The N.S.A. Spies on Angela Merkel and the Critical Mom Provides the Transcript

Just between you, me, and the fencepost, I know what Obama heard when he was listening in on Angie's phone calls, courtesy of the NSA.
It might have been a lullaby--it put him right to sleep.  In fact, it was so, well, banal, that he mixed it up with phone calls from Michelle, and that's how he got caught.
Are you ready?
Sit down now so you won't be shocked.
This is what Barry heard:
"Hi, Sweetie, we're running late."
"Ooof! Again?"
"I'm so sorry.  But there's chicken teriaki marinating in the fridge right now--the way you like it, with garlic, ginger, and orange juice.  If you want to get started before I get home you go right ahead--"
"Angie, you said you'd be home by NINE at the LATEST.  That's what you said."
"I know, Sweetie, but my secretary had to make some photocopies and the machine broke down and . . ."
"You're the chancellor of Germany!  How can the machine break down? It wouldn't dare!"
"Well, it did, it did--the woman who brings the paper wasn't around either, so after they fixed it . . ."
"(chortle) You didn't have any way to print?"
"(giggle) Yes, exactly."
"I love your giggle.  Do you think we might get away next Saturday?"
"If I don't have to deal with those awful . . . . wait!"
"Never mind.  How about Bad Salz- . . ."
"Oh, anywhere!  I have to run.  If I'm not back before nine, heat the wok and chop the zucchini and sauté that first, then set it aside . . . '
"Never mind, I know how to cook.  Get that cute little behind of yours home."

It's that last line, you see, that particularly mortifies our Angie.  I shouldn't really say "our," since I'm still an American citizen (in itself a blight, these days) and can't even vote for her.  But I admire the woman, I do.  She ought to settle Barry's hash, and fast.  Germany could always grant Edward Snowden asylum, and spring Chelsea Manning from the clink.  Get on that right away, Angie--ask Mossad for assistance.

The Critical Mom's Crisis, Part 2: Protecting the Kid from Pedophiles, Drunks, Wierdos

Our smallish city contends with a homeless population, a disaffected-punked-out-young-people population,  and a population of drug-abusing folks who congregate around the main railway station and the main tram station, our city's version of Times Square.  On our way to dance classes at the local ballet school, my daughter and I have to walk past loud, smoking, beer-bottle waving crowds of these folks, and I hold her hand.
 My sons go through the same area on the way to school, and they recently reported taking a short cut--"not the escalators, Mommy, 'cause they take too long--we just went through that tunnel on the side."
That tunnel--that poorly lit tunnel that nobody likes because it stinks of pee.
When they walked through, some drunk guys were in there peeing against the wall and making sure my boys saw them.  My boys felt embarrassed, and I could tell by the way they talked about the incident that it had disturbed them.  Children who see some guy doing something wrong feel almost that they've done something wrong themselves. 
I told my sons always to stay where they see plenty of people and light, never to take the shortcut when it's dark and they're on their own.  I told them those guys were sick, and should not have done that, and please never to go that way again.   They knew all that but they had to get rid of the disturbance by talking, and I encouraged them to talk.
How much should I tell my children?  The school already provides a "my body is my body" lesson and a troupe of actors perform skits about what to do when an adult comes up to a child and says, "Come with me--your mommy sent you to me and your daddy is sick," or "Come look in my car."  On the street leading home from school, various shops have signs in the windows for "emergency islands," where any child feeling threatened may go.
But there's still the guy who goes down our street in a green car, calling to children.  There's still the man with the knife who went after a child in a toilet in the local park.  There's still the shady deals I see in the woods as I walk down the path leading to our house, the men back there trading something, and I look the other way.  There's still the time the girl arrived at the local ballet school crying because a man on the tram showed her his penis. 
My daughter, who is nine, wants to walk home from school alone, and her friends are allowed to do so.  One of them regularly walks through the woods alone to our house, past the drug deals in the woods.
At times like this I wish my daughter could morph into the most hideous child in the world during her walk home.  But she's Goldilocks.  She's Madeleine McCann.  I remember Etan Patz.
Finally I agreed to allow my daughter to go home alone during the last week of fourth grade, but warned her not to go through the woods.  
"Mommy,  let me show you how I'll go," she told me, heading for the well-lit road with family homes rather than the isolated woods.   She went on to detail how she knew how to run away from bad guys and I wondered how much she really knew.  I told her about the girl and the man on the tram--I said, "he showed her something he had no business showing her," and she said, "Eeewwww.  You mean like his thing where he pees?"  Neither of us were going to say, "penis."  And I told her that when I was her age, I'd headed home from school one day and a man in a parked car asked me the time, but when I told it to him he also showed me what he had no business showing me.  And I told her to run away. 
"Mommy, eewwww.  We had all this in school."  But now I know that she knows it can happen to us, that these guys are sick, and that she should run the other way.
I still want to post bodyguards all along the route the week she comes home from school alone.

More Diet-Friendly Fish from the Critical Mom

Salmon, salmon, salmon again.  (Salmon from Aldi, the cheapo grocery, not Edeka, the hotsy-totsy one?  Will it be any good?)  Okay, let's assume it's not quite fresh (but as it turns out, it is fresh).  Fresh or not so fresh, this is a good, low-calorie fish recipe:

One chunk (generous:  the size of two men's thumbs) ginger

Two big slices of Aldi fresh salmon (enough for three people)

Fresh-squeezed orange juice (two or three oranges)

Dash or two of low-sodium soy sauce

Fresh ground pepper (from one of those grinders that mixes black, green, and red peppercorns)

Garlic powder



First, rinse the salmon.  Set aside.

Make the orange juice.  Grate the ginger into it--grate very fine.

Add a dash or two of the soy sauce.  Mix.  

Put the fish in a bowl, pour the mixture over it, let it marinate at least a few hours.   When you're ready to cook, pre-heat the oven to about 250º C (about 480ºF).  Put the fish in a baking dish, pour the marinade over.  Grate the pepper over the fish and sprinkle with garlic powder.  Put in oven under the broiler, using whirling heat if possible.


Side dishes:  steamed broccoli is nice.  Sushi rice too.

If you don't need to lose weight, brown sugar is delicious in the marinade.  And a dash of sesame oil--the dark, aromatic kind.

The fish needs around eight-ten minutes under the broiler.  Baste once.  Enjoy!

What The Critical Mom Hates About Germany

Yesterday, my daughter and I went to Galeria Kaufhof, a large department store, to buy some gift paper with which to wrap my husband's birthday presents.  We picked up some ingredients for his cake, too.  And we didn't have to wait long for the saleslady, who, with the German efficiency I love, took my credit card immediately and packed away our items carefully.
Then she did that thing that I hate, and I rarely see it coming.  Addressing my nine-year-old daughter, she smiled a sappy, sentimental grin that German salespeople--and especially old ladies who lived through the war--get, and announced, "Und das ist für Dich!" ("And this is for you!") and she handed my daughter a pack of gummi bears.  It's usually gummi bears, although sometimes it's "Traubenzucker," which is artificially colored and flavored dextrose, and which they sometimes imagine is "healthy."  They sometimes have "bio" or what they deem organic gummi bears.  Fortunately my daughter does not like gummi bears anyway.  
Does it ever occur to these folks that the mother may not want her kid to have sugar or candy?  Unless, of course, I give it to them because it is their birthday, or my husband's birthday, or mine.  And then I bake a cake, or a tart, and at least that's got a few healthy ingredients in it--not just sugar.  Sometimes I just wave those salesladies away with "Nein, danke," and they look astonished.  Then shocked.  They give the child who has been denied the sweets a shake of the head and a commiserating look, as if to say, "I'm sorry your mommy is so mean."  Then they make that disapproving clicking noise with their tongues, and then I am The American Lunatic Who Tortures Her Children By Refusing Them Candy, Which Is Their Birthright.  The poor, poor children, think the old ladies--those old ladies who used to press chocolate bars into the hands of my then six-month old son as we stood at the local busstop in Bavaria.  If I took it away they looked as though they might be about to call the cops on me, or maybe the local child protection agency.
All this may have started with the teutonic custom of the "Schultüte," or  "school cone."  There is no English equivalent for this nefarious term.  The "Schultüte" is a big cardboard cone filled with candy and toys that is given every German-speaking schoolchild (and, I believe, some Scandinavian ones too) on the first day of school, to "sweeten" what the Germans consider the torments, if not the rigors of school.  Nowadays teachers plead with parents to include fewer sweets and more colored pencils, but their cry often falls on deaf ears, probably because those teachers don't believe it themselves.  They're the ones bringing in cake and ice cream on their birthdays, and since every kid gets to bring sweets on his or her birthday, that's a lot of sugar on your child's teeth.
So I make them brush, and I growl a lot, and I pack whole-grain bread sandwiches in their schoolbags, and I wish the other parents had done what we did with the ole "Schultüte"--fill it up with DVDS, stickers, toys, and one or two teeny little packs of those gummi bears the salesladies gave us . . . the rest of them, oh ye un-reformable German people, have gone straight into the trash!

P.S. The last time we went to Galeria . .  . and after many comments were posted, they offered apples, not candy.  THANK YOU, GALERIA! Here's hoping the local pharmacy and other stores will follow suit.

The Critical Mom's Shoulder of Lamb

This is a great fall-and-winter dish.  You can experiment with vegetables, but the main flavors are:

garlic, garlic, and garlic

and

rosemary--fresh rosemary.  

The shoulder of lamb should be fresh, bloody, and gigantic--the about as big as, say, MY shoulder and part of my arm.  Once you've got it out of the fridge, pre-heat the oven to 180º C or 356º F.

 Put the lamb on a plastic cutting board and cut inch-long slits all over the top of it.  Into this you wish shove slices of fresh garlic, and after that bits of fresh, and freshly-washed rosemary.  We have rosemary growing in a window-box right outside our kitchen door; it beats dry packaged rosemary, which you may use if desperate.

Start with four carrots:  peel them, cut off the ends, and throw the peel and ends to the guinea pigs, the children, or the pet of your choice.

Slice the carrots into inch-thick disks and boil them until they are a little big soft.  Set aside.

Take one or two medium-size zucchini.  Wash and slice into disks.  Make a pile of them in your baking dish about the size and shape of your shoulder of lamb.  Drain the carrots and add.  Sprinkle with garlic powder or (my favorite) the MultiCulti herbs that you can buy at Oil&Vinegar (see recent post about fish for a link).

Set the shoulder of lamb over the carrot-zucchini mix.   Then sprinkle garlic salt all over it.  You may wish to rub a little olive oil over the whole thing, but it is not necessary for you to do so.  Slice around ten baby tomatoes and glom them on to the lamb; the garlic salt ought to offer some traction so that they actually stick to it.   Wash and slice several red bell peppers--large slices that you can drape over the tomatoes--or cover any area not covered by tomatoes.  Then add around five ounces of red wine.  You can also add the wine before the tomatoes and peppers, though it's possible doing so will render the lamb slippery again.

Put the whole thing in the oven--take a fork and put the tomato and pepper slices that have slid off back on.

Close oven door.  Let the lamb bake for about two hours and a half.

Serve with a glass of red wine.  

Alternative:  boil some potatoes and add them in with the lamb.

Enjoy!

The Critical Mom's Fatigue

Somehow or other, the Critical Mom has to get four syllabi done and prepare the classes that go with them.  But she is preoccupied with the writing project that seems to have no sense of direction and then there's the laundry, the cooking, the relative cleanliness of the kitchen (A child complained at finding a grasshopper near his breakfast . . . the grasshopper proved athletic, difficult to confine, but did make it outside in a plastic cup.)  Spiders still waltz around the ceiling unless I take the broom and whack away their webs.  The guinea pig cage needs cleaning . . . more, now, since it's too cold to take the critters to their outdoor cage, and the indoor one all too rapidly becomes a giant litterbox.  (But I cleaned it a couple days ago!) But they eat and poop and eat and poop and I like to see them eat so I have to put up with them pooping.  Whenever I ask the kids to remove the garbage or clean the toilet they seem to have gone deaf.
What's a mom to do?
Well, a chocolate bar would be nice right about now.
I just phoned a friend in New York instead.

Another Low-Calorie Fish Recipe from the Critical Mom

So you're starving, it's Friday night, and normally you let yourself go and have wine, a cheese course after a sumptuous dinner, and then a hunk of chocolate or two after the cheese course.  And more wine.  Here's one method of avoiding all that, but feeling fairly full:

Set your oven to broil.

Slice up a bunch of miniature tomatoes.  Enough to comfortably support two or three six-ounce pieces of salmon filet.

Line the baking dish with the halves of tomatoes.  Rinse your two or three slices of salmon filet and lay them gently across the tomatoes, so that the latter support the fish.

Sprinkle the fish with The Herbs of Your Choice.  I used the MultiCulti blend from Oil&Vinegar containing rosemary, basil, a few other green things, and sea salt: http://ca.oilvinegar.com/herbs-spices/mills-grinders/multi-culti-grinder-36g-1-27oz.html
Plus garlic powder.   But Lemon Pepper and plain ole garlic salt would do just fine.  Squeeze half a lemon over the fish.  

Cut up a red bell pepper into thin strips and lay them over the fish.

Set aside. 

In your steamer, put freshly washed broccoli or string beans.

 Put the fish in the oven and turn the heat on under the steamer.  In about fifteen minutes you can eat.  One glass of wine is okay.

Of course I went off the diet completely after the fish course, gobbling a few hunks of cheese, a few Zwieback, another glass of red wine, and one-and-a-half milk chocolate bars.  But I just had a two-hour tapdance rehearsal so it's okay.

So long as I don't actually gain weight by tomorrow.

First Position is Last

First Position, the high profile ballet documentary by Bess Kargman, has been out long enough for me to see the trailer a few times on You-Tube and stare at the poster advertising the film taped to the door at our local ballet school.  So we finally bought the DVD.
But much of this film is not really about ballet--not ballet as I knew it watching Makarova, Kirkland, Gregory and Van Hamel back in the seventies.
In those days, too many dancers were cocaine addicts or anorectic or both.  Or married to people with drug problems. 
Nowadays, the problems differ--to a degree.  What First Position reveals is a generation of dancers shaped by brutal overwork--children dancing roles created for mature dancers.   The results of this excessive training--which often starts as early as age three and continues seven days a week--is, for instance, the twelve-year-old Miko Fogarty dancing Kitri from Don Quixote:  Ms. Fogarty, technically driven and musical, has gone on, now that she is sixteen, to greater glories.
But does she menstruate?  Has she ever developed breasts?  At twelve, the bones in her chest were prominent.
Will her feet function when she is twenty-five?  Pointe work should begin around age eleven.  But Fogarty was already dancing Kitri at age twelve, so she must have started pointe around age six.
Will her hips disintegrate before she is twenty-five?
Will she still be able to dance at all at that age?
What kind of strength will this prodigy have after all the hours of excessive, damaging stretching? 
It's one thing to have hip-replacement surgery in your sixties.  Or even your fifties.  But for a dancer to have it in her twenties--that's a bad, bad, sign of the times.
Highly evident from this exceedingly disturbing film--all the more disturbing since so many regard it as an uplifting tribute to dedicated young dancers--is the destruction of ballet as an art.  What is ballet today if not a mix of contortion and acrobatics? Ballet today is hypermobility, or extreme stretching of joints.  It's thrilling to see a leg extend way above the ear, and a degree of hypermobility has always been a part of ballet training.  But First Position shows a turbo-charged, stepped-up training, in which young limbs are stretched daily, young, developing feet go into toe shoes prematurely, and God knows what happens to the mature dancer.
No twelve-year-old was meant to dance a role as technically and emotionally demanding as Kitri, a girl in love.  The role of Kitri requires feisty independence and sexy-know-how--joyfully as Ms. Fogarty danced, she does not have the experience--at least we hope not--to make this role what it should be.The hypersexualizing of children that beauty pageants promote is now evident in ballet competitions.
Miko's mother burst into tears talking about her son quitting ballet.  I have to admire this little boy--thrust, at age ten, into dancing the role of the Swan Prince--having the guts to say no to the mother who is filmed, in a classroom scene, forcing his leg into a stretch that does nothing but destroy the strength he might have had as a mature dancer, should he have chosen to continue his training.  It's not thrilling to see a ten-year-old boy doing tours en l'air (and here's what they are:

  No ten-year-old can do these turns well, and even if an exceptionally coordinated, strong boy manages to do so, the risk of injury or permanent damage is great.  What would his and Miko's stage mother do if her daughter quit?  One of the most chilling moments of First Position occurred when Fogarty described the feelings of a character she was dancing:  "Like a bird struggling to get out of a cage."  Is ballet a cage for her--one that she does not acknowledge?  Is her mother's longing for stardom the fuel keeping the talented daughter going?  Audiences are thrilled to see highly trained children doing tricks on stage.  But this film is about child abuse:  forcing children out of childhood into a version of adulthood that ensures they'll never reach the real thing.  Their emotional life must remain stunted and physically they'll be wreaks.   
Portraits of parents run the gamut from stage mother to supportive.  Or one of these under the guise of the other.  Miko Fogarty's mother pushes, tells her to smile, seems entirely obsessed with the idea of her daughter as a ballerina.  Other parents seem astonished that their son wants to dance, but do all in their power to find him the best teacher available.  Still others see dance as a road out of poverty.
The boys in ballet have it easier than they did a generation ago.  Ballet is filled with masculine, heterosexual boys:  it is no longer exclusively the refuge of gay men who have landed there because they have few other places to be themselves.   But ballet teachers seem, in this film, to live through their students vicariously, to place young students in dangerously demanding roles in order to satisfy their own desires for fame.
The boy from the military family profiled in this film struck me as a victim of a childishly sadistic, possibly pedophilic personality in his teacher:  footage showed the teacher chain-smoking, making bizarre, grinning faces, and slapping his prodigy on the belly and elsewhere whenever he felt like reminding him to pull in his stomach or turn out his thigh.
There are better ways to correct students.
The film showed two very different personalities who had in common their difficult beginnings and their longing to excel in order to remove financial burdens from their families, or even support them:  Michaela de Prince and Joan Sebastian Zamora come from impoverished backgrounds--she was orphaned as a young child in Sierre Leone and adopted by an American couple; he is supporting his family back in Colombia.  These dancers struck me as the most artistically developed of the personalities portrayed in the film--she is a radiant powerhouse, a sort of African-American Melissa Hayden, and he is a gorgeously lyrical, strong dancer whose style lends itself to the Royal Ballet--and he's won a scholarship to their school.  Ms. De Prince has had serious injuries--and no wonder, she is very hyperextended and routinely stretches her legs to what I would consider extremes.  
The brutality of contemporary training--the rush to build muscle and start pointe work young, the grotesque stretching--is one that I will make sure my daughter, a young dance student, avoids.  We'll stick to the basics:  a schedule that includes rest (never, never, seven days a week) and I'm not letting her put her feet in pointe shoes before she's eleven--and probably twelve.

Ten Ways Not To Write Memoir

First, think you know the story.  Tell it to yourself several times.  Read and re-read old journals going back to 1977 and then read excruciatingly painful old letters and look at faded old photographs that you think, mistakenly, will reveal clues to character.

The only clues to anything lie in your own memory.  And if you can't believe that, and though I know it is perfectly true I can't, then you're sunk.

The finer points:

(1) A memoir must be either poignant (Maxine Hong Kingston, Helen Fremont, Mary Karr) or funny (David Sedaris, Augusten Burroughs).  Or both.

(2) Try to write poignant.  End up with maudlin listen-to-my-tragic tale.

(3) Try for funny.  End up with sicko slapstick or worse.

(4)  Remember the formulae: "Emotion recollected in tranquility" or "Inspiration counts" or "Write and re-write."

(5) Read The New York Times, write a blog post about not writing, unload the dishwasher, re-load the washing machine, feed the guinea pigs, feed the fish, eat something, close your eyes for a few minutes, oh, it's almost time to pick up a child and then--

(6) Lose your keys.  A daily practice.  Be sure to lose them in a different place every day, so that it always takes you fifteen minutes to find them, and by the time you do you are out of breath, sweating, and late.

(7) Write in your journal about how you're wondering what the real story is, since you've now told it to yourself and found that when you're downstairs with no access to your computer making macaroni and cheese you know the story but by the time you've rushed upstairs to write it down it's fallen into pieces in your hands, confetti, and the confetti turns into mist and evaporates.

(8) Sit down and write the completely fabricated Science Fiction story about the character being chased by God.  In whom you don't believe.

(9) Think about the story more until you suddenly feel very, very sleepy and "have to lie down."

(10) Do I really have to re-live it all to write it?  Really?

Follow these principles daily and a sufficient amount of nothing will happen.  However, if you think about the topic enough to give yourself nightmares, some version of a story will eventually emerge.  I think.

Grocery Shopping, Casual German Racism and the Critical Mom

The Critical Mom--New York born and New York bred and when she dies she's New York dead--can't resist a bargain.  "Why pay more?" is my mantra.  Always on the hunt for delicious bargains, never forgetting the sight of two determined women struggling over the last porcini mushrooms at the Fairway on West 74th (shoving behind them a gay man who was too chivalrous for his own good) I hunt, but in this German town, which shall remain unnamed, I don't often find.  

Oh, vegetables exist here.  Glossy, big bright-red and bright yellow and bright orange and bright green bell peppers.  But not the adorable tiny ones you can throw into a pasta dish.  

Unless, naturally,  you pay through the nose at the local farms where, while handing over 42 euros for three marinated lamb fillets, you can feast your eyes on rows upon rows of "bio," that is, organic, fresh pasta, homemade wines and jams.  Heading back to your car,  you can look at a hen house filled with well-fed, clucking, organic-feed consuming chickens.  Beside them a cage filled with fluffy guinea pigs and their young, the babies boasting the enormous feet of the newborn.  Somewhere in the background the clopping of horse hooves completes the portrait: a world of farm-fresh rosy-cheeked white people in Marc O'Polo jackets who eat fancy sausages wrapped in butcher paper instead of plastic.

On the way home from the farm with the New York prices, my nine-year-old remembered that her friend with the Moroccan mom and the Palestinian dad shopped at a different store, and we pull up to a friendly, shabbily genteel place bursting with fresh vegetables, every kind of dried bean you can imagine (much cheaper than Edeka!)  endless varieties of Bulgur, a cornucopia of risotto and sushi-style rice at a fraction of the price you pay for the "bio" kind.  Finally I felt at home.  It was like being at the West Side Market, but the prices were New York c. 1952.  

So I mention this place to my German lady friends and they say, "But it's not clean!" or they say, "But it's dirty!"  Now, I have heard this comment before and I have heard it about an excellent local ballet school where the linoleum on the floor is slightly worn but the instruction is stellar.    But these German ladies feel insecure when surrounded by anything not new, not polished within an inch of its life, and not German.  
The very thing I love about the other grocery store--the fount of spinach, so fresh the earth from which it was ripped is still moist on it, the piles of parsley overflowing the bin--is what they mistrust.  The place isn't neat.  It's not tidy.  Vegetables (according to their cosmology) should be so clean that a city child might believe they were produced in a factory.  It's true, a German chicken will occasionally sport a feather, but a tidy feather.  The zucchini, the German ladies believe, is more aesthetically pleasing in a little net bag or in plastic wrap.  Not sticking up all over the place!  Sticking up!  In every direction!  Reminding one of things that intensive housekeeping tends to make one forget.  The German ladies.  They tidy me up:  Stepping off the tram once I was startled by an older woman grabbing my coat to let me know that my pants leg was sticking into the top of my boot.  She thought I'd want to straighten it out.
I don't like straightening things out, in general.
The patrons of the grocery with the wonderful Bulgur and the fresh vegetables and the juicy, delicious, Halal lamb (far less expensive than that at the fancy farm) are mostly not German.  They are Turkish and Arab and foreign--like me, the former New Yorker, and like my husband, who comes from a different region of Germany.

It's one place we can go, join the other outsiders, and get a good deal. 

The Critical Mom and the First Day of School

The Middle Child is the ultra-prepared one.  Schoolbag packed the night before.  Dressed in a nanosecond.  Out the door like a shot five minutes before his tram arrives.

The Oldest Child is told that he's got to be the responsible one . . .  a task he sometimes enjoys, and this time it has to do with taking an American exchange student around and translating for her.  She likes math, it turns out, which is most convenient since he does not, and as he translates the problems for her, he finds himself able to solve them.  A hint from her when he's stuck, and it's smooth sailing.

The Youngest Child suffers from her popularity.  The same problems of friends fighting over her have resurfaced with a somewhat more complicated plot (as befits the Tween years--she's now in fourth grade).  The latest troubles involve a potential club and some friendship bracelets that have been dangled by the child who always seems to have a schoolbag filled with apples of discord:  she'll hand out the friendship bracelets to those who will join the club.  Otherwise, they go back in the bag.   And no joking around!  The keeper of the friendship bracelets stalked off, agreeing to return only for the serious business of forming the club.  Which still has not been formed--my daughter suggested they have the bracelets without the club, and has yet to be forgiven by this  haughty child--the one who used to tell our little sweetie, "I'll give you til Tuesday to decide whether you're MY best friend or HER best friend." This girl has a curious hold on ours, who feels responsible. 

"I just don't want any fights," says ours.  And couldn't fall asleep last night until ten, something that never happens, but she says it has nothing to do with her friends, whom she does not care to discuss.

Sometimes people do fight, say I.

It helped when her teacher talked to her.  After her father, her brothers and I had all been told how wrong we were and how we did not understand the situation at all, her teacher told her the same things we had been saying, but now the situation improved.

The teacher told a story.  She, too, had once been eight years old.  She, too, had found herself very unhappy because a bunch of girls were mean to her.  She walked into a new school hoping to find a friend, and the girls dressed differently.  They pointed at her and made fun of her sweater and wouldn't let into their group anybody who dressed funny like her.

"And then I made a big mistake," she told our daughter, who was hanging on her every word.  "I thought, Mommy and Daddy are too busy--I won't bother them.  So I cried all night."

She told my daughter, "When your friend tells you to choose between being friends with her and being friends with your other friend, you say, No, you choose whether you want to be my friend and I'll choose my other friends."

Now that worked just fine for a while, but my daughter is now off to school with Ms. Apple of Discord.  Well.  That led to the Trojan War, but also to the Founding of Rome.  Looking on the bright side.

The Critical Mom's Low Calorie Practically No-Fat Meal

When the family members who are dieting really want a no-fat meal, there is a way to do it with an exceedingly small amount of fat.  I would actually not count the "fat" I added as fat, and see if you can identify it in the following list of ingredients.

Two large heads of broccoli.  (Wash, cut stems away from florets, but in pot ready to steam.  But don't steam them yet.)  Set aside.

In a small pot put half a cup of water, a tablespoon of dry chicken broth (chicken bouillon powder), a diced red bell pepper, a grated carrot, one minced garlic clove (or more) and/or grated fresh ginger.  Let boil briefly, stirring, then let simmer.

Arrange slices (about 5 oz each or around 200 grams) of salmon in a dish (rinse first).  Grate fresh pepper over the fish fillets. Then pour the veggie-broth mixture over the salmon.

Put the salmon in the oven, which you've preheated to 220 at least--put the oven tray near the broiler and set the oven to whirling heat.

Start the broccoli steaming at the same time.

Fifteen minutes later, you can eat.

Where is the fat?  A teeny, tiny bit in the chicken powder.  Less than in a tablespoon of olive oil

The Critical Mom Writes

"Writing is easy," Robert Benchley remarked.  "You just stare at the blank piece of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead."

Or you escape to your blog, slap up a recipe or a cute thing one of your kids said, and call it a day.  But the thing I've been writing for so long keeps vaulting into my head and giving me nightmares.  Unless it's the diet that's giving me the bad dreams in which someone is being chased or terrorized or drowning.  Computers make you lose track of revision.  Writing the whole thing longhand might be the way to go . . . writing it out by hand slows you down, although it doesn't necessarily make you think more clearly.  The story shifts in your head.  It makes no sense.  It was never any good.  It's ridiculous.  Tear up the printout and toss it over your shoulder where it lands on the other balled-up papers and makes no sound.  

It seems less awful than yesterday's version, but it ain't there yet.

I am not as funny as David Sedaris, whom I once met before he was David Sedaris, in a humor-writing class at the 63th street Y--the old McBurney Y.  I sat around a table with smartly dressed women who had just come from work.  In crept a dishevelled guy with a three-day growth who seemed peculiar.  I sat at the opposite end of the table from him.  The teacher--a jolly Englishwoman--asked everyone to read something.  Four people read highly forgettable things.  A serious woman with a deep voice read a parody of Sylvia Plath that made me laugh out loud.  She looked disgusted.

"That's the crowd-pleaser," she said, radiating disappointment.  

The disheveled guy read.  He read what soon became known as The SantaLand Diaries.  He was riveting.  

"Can I touch the hem of your garment?" is what I thought.  He left and never came back to class, but I remembered him when I read his wonderful description of being a Santa's elf at Macy's.  Last year I assigned that in a class on dystopias in American literature. 

If only I could be as funny as Sedaris.  If only touching the hem of his garment could transfer his brilliance, and make it all easy.

I like the story in Bird by Bird, Anne LaMott's guide to writing.  Students sit in a writing class clamoring for the trick to getting an agent.  The speaker just picks up a legal pad and pencil and starts writing.  They ask again.  Mutely, she picks up that pencil and that pad and writes.

Write, write, write.  Maxine Hong Kingston talked herself into it with the idea that no-one but she herself would ever read it. 

That is, of course, my greatest fear.

So once in a while my husband reads some of it.  He, too, finds it less awful than it used to be.

The Unmanning of Bradley

Will apparently happen soon.  If he has his way.  But not in the way he imagines.  

If he really wants to be Chelsea.  And what a load of associations the average reader makes to that name.  The New York neighborhood.  The Clinton child whose parents had just visited the London, not the New York, neighborhood and who had so fallen in love with the the Joni Mitchell song, "Chelsea Morning," that they decided they wanted to name their child after it.

But oh, Bradley, what gives?  Your timing is lethal.  For you, I mean.  Those creeps down at the prison will eat you alive and I am very much afraid that you could end up like Jeffrey Dahmer, and although I do not believe that he got what he deserved, I can imagine folks thinking that he did.

Here we all are thinking you've been revealing something that Edward Snowden exposed in what seemed to me a more responsible fashion, and now your story is ending the way Tootsie ended, if anyone remembers that spectacular Dustin Hoffman comedy of 1982 whose climax involved an on-screen unveiling of a real sexual identity in a soap opera.

A soap opera is what we've been having, Bradley, ever since they said you had fetal alcohol syndrome because your upper lip was peculiar.  And started interviewing your mother.

And I, who had imagined you were young and tortured because they were making you stand around naked and because you were spending time in prison in the first place began to wonder if you were sane.

All power to your sex-change operation, if you are granted the means to get one.  But you are entering a place whose walls ooze testosterone, whose employees sweat ball-busting hairy machismo, and who will feel challenged, threatened, at the very least exceedingly startled, by your revelations.  They will feel as sympathetically to you as Hitler to the Jews.  Why tell them now? 

I would have told you to keep that hat on Chelsea until you are outta there.  Chelsea doesn't get to date until then anyway .  But now that you are in prison, she's even more likely to get raped.

Unless all this revelation is part of some exceedingly bizarre plea bargain?
POST HOC: Okay, Chelsea's been sprung from the clink, and hurrah! What about Edward Snowden? Let's save him, too!

Another Dieter's Dinner from The Critical Mom

What do you feed three starving people who are beginning to think that tofu tastes "really good, Mommy!"  These are meat-eating German men, too, chowing down on Tofu marinated in garlic, rosemary, and thyme with a little egg and stir-fried in a teaspoon of vegetable oil.

Okay, a square meal for these guys without anything fattening:

First, chop up a zucchini or two and a yellow bell pepper, and enough garlic to make James Beard roll over smiling in his grave.

Throw these into a large frying pan into which you have place a carefully measured tablespoon of olive oil.  Preferably the greenest kind, since you're no longer supposed to fry anything in the stuff but if you do, at least use the green kind.

Set aside.

Pre-heat your oven to 190-200º C or around 375º F

Wash a chicken big enough for three hungry eaters.  Put in pan.  Stuff with the vegetable mixture.  Once it is stuffed, squeeze a lemon or a lime over the chicken, and sprinkle on garlic salt and Lemon Pepper.  Put in oven for an hour.  About fifteen minutes before you take it out, pour over it water in which ginger has been soaking all day.  (This is instead of the white wine I would normally use).

While the chicken is cooking, make some healthy whole grain.  I used large-grained bulgur, the kind from TEMA, 

http://www.temafinefoods.com/

The "fine importer of Arabic foods," as their website accurately remarks, and alas the German housewives won't set foot in the one in our town.  The place needs a facelift, that's why.  The food inside is gorgeous, so ignore the walls that need a paint job, etc.  You never saw fresher vegetables, fresher lamb, and I'm sure it's Halal, or a better selection of inexpensive, high-quality grains, a tamer and more expensive version of which may be found at EDEKA.

So I used large-grained bulgur from Turkey, and I rinsed it in a sieve and dumped it into a frying pan in which was sizzling a diced red onion turning transparent in one tablespoon of olive oil (I won't lie--it wasn't the green kind, but it will be the green kind when I get around to buying the green kind).

Olive oil has a nicer flavor than plant oil.  Rather, it has a flavor, and plant oil doesn't.

So you put in the bulger and stir it around with the onions.   If you were making this dish the non-dietetic way, you'd have added more olive oil so the bulgur really browned.  Anyway, you add grated carrots instead, and pour on chicken broth and simmer on low heat til the bulgur is fluffy.

We ate.  Oh, did we eat.  When my husband cut the chicken the gleaming vegetables with rosemary (forgot to say, added a bit of fresh rosemary) looked like something the Good Housekeeping kitchen would have liked to photograph.

"Happy Birthday to Blog": The Critical Mom Turns One

A year ago to the day, my then thirteen-year-old doctored around with my computer and set up this blog, following a stroll down the beach during a disconcertingly disappointing vacation.  It was hot as blazes and humid as New York, although we were in Nantucket, which was supposed to be the breezy antidote to the unbearable city air.  Instead, we had to smear anti-tick essential oils on ankles, wrists and necks before we went out, and I had to dribble peppermint oil all over his bed to dispel bedbugs.  On the beach I used to go to as a child, Dionis, I had promised his younger brother and sister that maybe we would find the clay cliffs that used to be there, near a rock in which quartz pebbles spelled out "Sachem Springs."  I found not the rock but the cliffs, scooped one small handful, and got screamed at by a man who then belted out the perils of cliff erosion.

I thought he was exaggerating until a friend, a native, said, "I have seen a house fall off a cliff."  

As my elder son and I strolled down the pebble beach observing the blue, and still lovely horizon, he came up with the idea that I could write a blog.  And I thank him still, from the bottom of my heart.

Happy Birthday to you
Happy Birthday to you
Happy Birthday dear Blah-blah (keep blah-blahing on) Blog
Happy Birthday to you

The year has proved anything but uneventful, and I'm delighted to have two followers. Several readers whom I don't know drop in and comment from time to time and several friends regularly read the blog.  I invite you all to invite your friends to read, and to click on those ads, too.  The Critical Mom would be more than delighted to hear from readers about issues they'd like for her to cover.

The Critical Mom's Diet

After the glorious vacation comes the moment when your jeans feel very, very tight--in fact, you really can't wear them anymore, and a trip to the scales shows the dreaded 2.5 kilo gain (over five pounds).   The spectacular food on that cruise--the cheese platters, the shrimp with a dash of sesame oil, the hot waffles with chocolate sauce, milk chocolate, white chocolate, and dark chocolate chips plus the mound of whipped cream . . . that I ate every day.  I used the cross trainer on the ship, which made me feel virtuous and provided the illusion that I was burning "a lot" of calories.

So now comes the diet, and because my husband gained the same amount, as did our fourteen-year-old, we have all decided to suffer together, me on a reduced calorie diet involving loss of fats and wine, and my husband on the same, with a nod to certain favored dishes on the Metabolic Balance diet (http://de.metabolic-balance.com/)--a German thing, but American versions of it exist.  

So for breakfast I go wild:  two or three pieces of toasted bread with a spread mixing vegetable oil with butter; a huge cup of café au lait with two tablespoons of sugar; an orange.

Things get tougher around lunchtime.  Yesterday I had a soup made of pulverized cauliflower, chicken broth (the fat-free kind), and scallions, over a plateful of spaghetti.  Dinner was broiled fish (covered in tomatoes, scallions, herbs, and a half-tablespoon of olive oil, a huge helping of steamed broccoli, and less than a cup of brown rice.

It was good.  I felt full for a few minutes.  Crabbiness, occasional headache, slight nausea, and sleepiness are all side effects.

I dream of chocolate-covered waffles and piña coladas.   I dream of hunks of cheddar on water biscuits with a glass of red wine and a few slices of perfectly ripened pear.  I dream of coconut chicken ("Put de lime in de coconut"--also the ginger, the cilantro, the garlic).

On weekends, I will have one glass of wine.  Not two or three.  And maybe on little gob of dessert made of frozen berries, a dab of sugar, lemon, and yoghurt.   See the food network for low-calorie videos.

First world problems!  And they seem so very severe, too!

The Cuckoo's Calling and The Critical Mom

It's a great read, and I read it in exactly the place one enjoys such page-turning "Krimis" as the Germans call detective novels:  the sunny beaches of Stralsund.  Even though I figured out the identity of the killer somewhere around page sixty (or earlier--no spoilers here; I'm not going to tell you exactly on which page I determined this) and even though I correctly guessed the identity of the body that got recovered from the Thames the moment I read that a corpse had been retrieved, I can honestly state that I loved this book as much as I detested The Casual Vacancy--although, curiously enough, some of the same types whom I found tedious in The Casual Vacancy populate this far more successful whodunit.  Robert Galbraith--aka J.K. Rowling--loves to write about low life: models and street people on drugs or booze who lie and cheat, slip into tawdry one-night stands, and exploit anything that breathes.  But in The Casual Vacancy, my problem was my sense that Rowling loathed these characters, that the only reason they existed on the page was that she wanted to vent her hatred of them.  I couldn't find anyone with whom I wanted to side.

The Cuckoo's Calling had me rooting for the underdog detective who just got dumped by his girfriend and whose hugeness and hairy stomach recall Hagrid--except that he's much smarter than Hagrid.  

Cormoran Strike, The Lord Peter Whimsey of Rowling's first published detective novel, is no Lord Peter.   The illegitimate son of a Mick-Jaggerlike figure and a groupie, Strike has, well, many strikes against him in class-conscious Great Britain, but parries them with equanimity.  Favorite moments of mine occurred whenever some irrepressibly curious character inquired about his paternity. 

"So the DNA test said," was one laconic reply; on another occasion he suggested the questioner call him herself to find out.

He is described as a "pube head," no complimentary definition of which I have been able to find. 

How come I was so sure I knew the killer's identity?  I followed a standard formula:  the killer must be the least likely person.  Apart from the detective himself, there seemed to me no character less likely to commit the crime.  Now, in certain other detective novels I have read--but I'm by no means a connoisseur--I've attempted to apply this formula with dismal results.  I never guessed right before, in other words.   Plotting is less strong in Rowling's detective novel than writing, which remains delightful, especially in snappy dialogues.  

I remember sitting beside a friend who was just reading the last third of the seventh Harry Potter book, knew that I had just finished it, and said, "I want to know whether Severus Snape is a bad guy or a good guy--DON'T TELL ME!"  Now, I couldn't have figured out what made Snape tick until Rowling told me, and I found the answers to his personality and behavior that she provided illuminating and satisfying.  I did not have quite the same sense of satisfaction with The Cuckoo's Calling, although I found the detailing of all the motivations leading to the crime--as well as of motivations of other characters--ingenious and entertaining.  A great beach read, but without the powerful originality of the Harry Potter books.  I'm glad to see J.K Rowling stretching herself as a writer, providing us with a detective with, well, magical powers of intuition, but his handicap feels too contrived as a means of making us sympathize with him, and I have a hunch that crime will not be the genre in which Rowling establishes herself,  I know she's sick of Harry Potter and does not wish to write more sequels (Am I the only one who wants second-and-third-generation tales of Ron's and Harry's and Hermione's children and their exploits, and maybe even another dark wizard?)  

I wonder if fantasy is the chief or the best source of Rowling's inspiration--could she write about another magical world, invoke something as different from the world of Hogwarts as, say, Philip Pullman, and produce another epic?

The Critical Mom's Perfect Vacation, Part Two

Binz.  Rhymes with Prince, although Americans tend to pronounce it to rhyme with "spins," and your head does do just that, when you realize that this particular beach enjoyed a reputation as the East Hampton of the unacknowledged aristocrats of East Germany before the wall fell, and is now--oh, democracy!--a Coney Island for the hoi polloi.  They are now Prince.

Witness the big yellow rubber thingamajig vaguely reminiscent of a Viking boat, holding ten foolhardy persons in life jackets and hauled . . . rapidly . . . by a motorboat.   Crack the whip until the ten passengers fall out, vomit, or both . . .  a rollercoaster-waterskiing combo.  I saw no signs of vomit, but I did see a convocation of extremely tatooed men waving around beer bottles and speaking a Slavic language.  I did not understand a word, but the object of the game seems to involve the kind of dares your mother told you never to take.  (How far can you pee?  Chug that beer?  How big a . . . never mind).

The water, however, is nice. You can swim for hours.  Which we did, while I looked to my left and contemplated not the great white chalk cliffs of Dover, but those of Rügen, painted by Caspar David Friedrich, the German landscape painter (i.e. of The Sublime).

  Those cliffs are something out of a fairy tale,

 and a fitting opposition to the big (Jugendstil?) style buildings that reminded me of the pavilion at Brighton, and which must have been spas for the upper echelons of the Communist party.  

But now everybody gets to build their own sandcastle, and I saw quite a few lovely ones, complete with shells all over their towers and drawbridges paved with more shells.  

Bathrooms?  We entered at "Angang 27" or ramp 27.  A little arrow pointed toward the "WC" and tiny writing informed me that it was 87 meters away.  There's nothing like the Germans for precision.  I walked my 87 meters (about 286 feet) and encountered the bathroom, complete with signs warning the visitor that responsibility for items forgotten there lay with the person who had forgotten them.  And just as I was discovering the bowl in which I was required to put my fifty cents payment, a relic of the DDR reared his head--Cerberus, as I like to think of him, could be smelled from outside the door.  He reeked of ancient pee.  He emerged from his little office behind the bowl just as I had found it and growled at me, and I put in my money and he sank back gratefully into his cave, and pushed around the papers on his desk like a true bureaucrat.

Rügen is a pastiche of politics and style--on the way home we listened to the skeptical German commentator's ideas about why the U.S. is currently closing so many embassies.  Obama--on his birthday, no less--says it is necessary to avoid terrorist attacks.  But the Germans--see The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen) have lived through surveillance too recently to swallow the idea that a surveillance state is necessary at all costs.  My husband remembers this same beach, this same place, in the early eighties, when he, a West German, managed a weekend visit with another Westerner.  In the hotel, they were segregated from Easterners.  They had to change marks into Eastern money every day, and if they didn't spend it, they lost it.   Lives of Easterners who talked to them--none did--would not have been worth the proverbial plugged nickel.

See The Lives of Others, and then then re-think the NSA's position. Snob that I am, I'll take today's Rügen over the DDR's Rügen any day. 

The Critical Mom and the Perfect Vacation

"If there were no if," says a German proverb (Wenn das Wörtchen wenn nicht wär) everything would be perfect.  If only I hadn't bruised or cracked a rib while on board The Good Ship Might as Well Be a Palace.

Back up and I'll trace that line of thought while a pancake browns on one side:  I can highly recommend TUI Cruises, in fact, TUI the travel company.   They have a way of installing German efficiency in the most mañana of Mediterranean or Latin ambiences.   Everything is on time, hot enough, properly cooled, and radiantly polite, even in Mallorca.  The curious thing is that the way they do this is by hiring non-Germans.  The entire housekeeping staff of "Mein Schiff" (My Ship--every guest enjoys the illusion that the ship belongs to him or her personally) hails from a Latin American, Central American country or from Southeast Asia (mostly the Philippines).  

"You know, Mommy," said the eleven-year-old, "the white German workers were paid for being nice, but the Philippino workers were already nice.  The Germans were being paid for being extra-nice."  Now, the kid grew up in Germany and I do believe he's overlooking standard Northern-German reticence:  it's impolite to seem overly interested in one's neighbor in the chilly reaches of the Teutonic world.  But the nice lady from Nicaragua who cleaned our cabin, and the Philipino guy who took care of the unbelievable mess that only three children can create in a tiny cabin with bunk beds, behaved as though they loved us, as though, in fact, nothing could have pleased them more than wiping surfaces globbed with toothpaste, finding clean glasses, making beds . . . when my husband shoved together the un-romantic twin beds and made them up as a cozy double bed, the nice lady from Nicaragua--Isabel is her name--popped in and inquired, in shocked tones, "Who made your bed?"  Clearly she was out for blood and moved toward the bed as if to shield us from the sight of such shoddy workmanship.  

"My husband," I admitted, and she giggled and re-made the bed, and you could have bounced a dime off it. Within the first nanosecond of our acquaintance, Isabel--and Rüel, who took care of the kids--had memorized their names and seemed to know their quirks and to be as fond of them as I am.  The staff aboard TUI were almost pathologically friendly and helpful.  And the German faction of the staff--mostly in concierge and maître d' positions--were as friendly as Germans ever are to strangers, that is, icily polite on the surface, but they'd probably lay down their lives for you if called to do so.

The other thing I bet you would never find on an American cruise line is the German Sauna--temperatures run to 85º C (that's 185º F) and the custom includes dumping ice and buckets of cold water over your head and back after you're roasted, sweating, and red as a boiled tomato in what they call an "Aufguss" which roughly translates as an infusion, but that makes it sound like a tea bag submerged in boiling water.  

No.  You're the tea bag being submerged.  Here's what happens:  You sit on wooden benches atop your towel--your feet must be placed upon your towel, so that your sweat never dampens the wood--among all the other happily expectant naked German people, all looking past the hot sauna rocks through the picture window at the sea with its whitecaps.   It soothes the soul to see the wind whip the waves while you, broiling, remain indoors.  Into the room comes a gorgeous young man or woman from the fitness center, draped in a sarong, and he or she explains that today's Aufguss will be Lemongrass.  Or Citrus-Honey.  In their hands they are carrying a wooden bucket and huge wooden ladle.  The young person--in stark contrast to us blobby, overweight, middle-aged persons, is slim and lithe and walks like a dancer.  The young person ladles the Lemongrass or Citrus-Honey infusion over the hot rocks, which sizzle and belch forth an aromatic, and searing hot, steam.  Taking a towel, the young person whirls it athletically over her or his head, flapping the hot aroma at us, and then flips the towel toward each now profusely sweating person.  
Want to know how Gretel felt when she peeked into the oven and told the witch she didn't know how to climb in?  Try that last flap of the towel during an Aufguss.

After the Aufguss, your husband pours a bucket of cold water over your head, and you yell, "YEOWWW!"  He's coming up behind you now with some ice.  The second time around you try it yourself, without screaming, and it feels like the pleasant tingle of diving into very cold New England water and swimming vigorously.   
But you'd never get this experience on an American cruise. (The American Heart Association tut-tuts: "People with high blood pressure should not move back and forth between cold water and hot tubs or saunas. This could cause an increase in blood pressure.")  
Try telling that to Germans.  I can imagine the look of astonishment.  But "Schwitzen ist gut!" they will say.  It is the way, the truth, the Om.  Sweat your way to health.  And be sure to pour on the ice cubes after.  You'll feel limp, but fine, and after what an American might deem a shock to the system, you get to lie in a 45º C (that's 113º F, and by this time it just feels cozy) sauna whose air is flavored with lavender or rose petals.  Or you can sit in a salt steam bath.

And now we are in Stralsund, and if only I had not aggravated my bruised or cracked rib by turning over in bed and bending over to pick up groceries and reading internet accounts of How It Could Be Broken and Puncture Your Lung (although the ship's doctor was pretty sure it was just bruised) and if only (Wenn das Wörtchen wenn nicht wär) my daughter had not woken up with what would be appendicitis if it were on her right side (but now she's sleeping and probably just needs to go to the bathroom) everything would be dandy.

We are reading A Wrinkle in Time.  She is so mad at The Man With The Red Eyes (the one who is hypnotizing Charles Wallace) that she would like to kill him. If I want to, she adds, I may write that she is not aggressive.  I must say, I was shaking my fist at the Man With The Red Eyes myself.

It is lovely and sunny and everyone but my daughter has consumed blueberry pancakes.  I had some Ibuprofen so now can cough without it being excruciating.  It is a sunny, lovely day, and even though the very complicated German washing machine turned on its own dryer and threatened to shrink up the fourteen-year-old's Nike T-shirts, the day promises to be lovely and sunny.  Friends are a phone call away, the beach a few kilometers, but we are too lazy to move.