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Vote Coakley!

This Tuesday, Massachusetts voters head to the polls to fill the US Senate seat laid void by Ted Kennedy’s death last August. Technically, Tuesday is just the party primaries, but no doubt the Democratic victor will triumph in January’s special election. Because this is Massachusetts, where the Democratic hegemony can only be usurped by really exciting Republicans like Mitt Romney.


The four Democratic candidates are Martha Coakley (entrenched Massachusetts pol/current Mass. Attorney General with lefty white-collar appeal), Michael Capuano (entrenched Massachusetts pol/US Congressman with blue-collar appeal), Alan Khazei (social entrepreneur/City Year founder with grassroots appeal) and Stephen Pagliuca (venture capitalist/Celtics owner with rich asshole appeal). Coakley is the front runner, with Capuano safely at her back, and Khazei gaining enough momentum to poll equally with Pagliuca, who is wasting his money on countless 30-second commercials that do nothing but remind me of my relative poverty.


The primary race is receiving a fair amount of media coverage, although Massachusetts is still in shock that no Kennedy — not nephew Joseph, nor widow Vicki — stepped up to claim a nearly guaranteed trip to the Senate. Yes, Caroline, I think we would have even taken you. Farcically, there is a Libertarian candidate named Joe Kennedy, who does attempt to “preempt any potential confusion caused by my name” by stating clearly in the nether regions of his website that he is not one of those Kennedys. Potential confusion? Why on Earth would anyone be confused if they saw the name “Joe Kennedy” on a ballot for Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat?


I watched the final debate last Monday night, when the candidates tangled (at times, ignobly — Capuano and Pagliuca, I’m looking at you) over the Patriot Act, abortion, health care, and foreign policy. All four attempted to show that they were ready for big-time Washington politics, with only Coakley pulling off a convincing senatorial demeanor. One frivolous but telling question: “How has your household changed since the recession?” Capuano said “Lightbulbs. We’ve changed to energy-efficient lightbulbs” (evidently he was re-purposing his prepared response for a question about how his household has become more green.) Pagliuca, a millionaire, said he was donating more to charity (props for not trying to spin some BS about clipping coupons, but he is hopelessly out of touch). Khazei earnestly prattled about his family’s grave economic hardships (touching and probably truthful, but a bit pitiful). Coakley gave a pat response about her family eating out less (believable and empathetic to the choices that many other well-to-do Americans have made).


The debate reaffirmed my decision to vote for Coakley, with Khazei my second choice. I hate to admit this, but my main reason for voting for Coakley is that she is a woman. Now you may say that I should vote on the issues, not on gender… but the under-representation of women in Congress is an issue. It’s a huge issue! There are currently 17 women in the Senate. Since the Senate was established in 1789, only 38 women have served (seven of whom were appointed after their husband’s death). Times have changed since the Eighteenth century, and it’s crucial for female representation in Washington to keep the pace with larger social progress, less the focus of politics remain a warped periscope, looking out for the interests of whatever it is that white male millionaires are interested in.


Given this, I don’t think that it’s wrong to vote for a qualified, smart candidate based on her gender (plus, it assuages some of the guilt leftover from all my Hillary and Sarah hate during the last Presidential election.) As Coakley herself once said, “Women always did all the work anyway, so we might as well get credit for it.”



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By Meredith – December 6, 2009

Breakfast of Champions

My endocrinologist ordered that I take a 2-hour blood glucose tolerance test, hoping to glean some insight into the apparent medical mystery that is my endocrine system. So today I woke up, skipped my customary breakfast of eggs and tea, and drove to the hospital for my 8am appointment (though the lab didn’t actually open until 8:20. Slackers.)
The kindly vampire prepared my arm for the initial draw of blood and asked, “Do you know how long you’re going to be with us today?”
“Two hours?” I replied.

“More like three hours, because before you drink the glucose, we need to send this blood sample to the lab for analysis,” he said. “That could take a half an hour, maybe an hour. Then after you drink, we wait two hours and take another sample.” I felt a pique of rage as the needle pinched my vein, as this meant I would not arrive at work until noon, meaning I would be working until 8pm tonight (because I’m the new girl, desperate to prove myself, and I’m not going to let my blood sugar get in the way).

As I sat in the waiting room, a man sitting across from me picked at a giant donut as he waited for his female friend to have her blood drawn. The baked sweetness drifted into my nostrils, and my stomach inexplicably gurgled. I haven’t eaten any sugar or flour in over 6 months, excepting a handful of special occasions that were really not worth it. The prospect of suddenly ingesting 75 grams of glucose freaked me out, as my few dietary transgressions have lead to dizziness, hunger pangs, and sweating.

75 grams of glucose. A grande frappucino has about 45 grams of sugar, so throw in a muffin and my breakfast of champions would be comparable to the standard American breakfast. I complained to Mr. Pinault that, if I had to put 75 grams of glucose into my blood stream, why did it have to be sugar water? Couldn’t they give me a gigantic chocolate bar? Mr. Pinault countered that I could sneak some Belgian truffles into the waiting room, to supplement the sugar bonanza, but I worried that my pancreas might explode.

Shortly before 9am, I was given a small bottle of orange liquid and told to drink it in 5 minutes or less. “Is it good?” I asked.

“It’s sweet,” he said. Boy, was it. Imagine a 2 liter bottle of Coke distilled into 8 ounces of syrupy liquid. I chugged it down in about 1 minute.

Mmmm... glucose drink

Mmmm... glucose drink

Within 15 minutes after drinking the glucose, I developed a mild headache, although it may have been due to the insipid banter of the medical assistants at the nearby X-Ray center. One woman was explaining how she blew her diet when her friend invited her over for cake. “And there was chocolate cake, red velvet cake, and mint chocolate chip ice cream! Of course I dug in!” she lamented to the clucking of her cronies. The mere idea of eating cake and ice cream evoked pure nausea.

After an hour, the headache intensified and I felt irritable. A woman waited for her husband at the X-Ray center with her young girl, who began to get antsy and loud. After 20 minutes of listening to the little girl bellow uncontrollably as her mother impassively read a magazine, I began shooting my glare of death.

At about minute 95, the headache abated but the nausea persisted. Surely this signals an inability to “normally” metabolize sugar, because surely most Americans don’t go through life ingesting large doses of sugar and then feeling ill and irritable? (Um, do they?)

I stared at the clock in the waiting room, willing it to tick down to 10:56am. “I don’t feel too good,” I told the woman who drew the second sample of blood.

“We have some crackers and juice for you,” she offered. What? Are you mad, woman? You’re offering someone who has ingested nothing but 75 grams of pure glucose in the past 15 hours more glucose?  Do they give this test to diagnose diabetes, or to cause diabetes?

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By Meredith – December 3, 2009

Stop Acupuncture Now

Tonight I was in Cambridge, walking to my acupuncturist for my seasonal qi tune-up, when I saw a large group of protesters further ahead of me on the street corner closest to her office. They were all wearing black and holding identical white signs with red letters. As I neared them, I squinted at the signs: Stop Acupuncture Now, they seemed to say.

Good Lord, they’ll protest anything in Cambridge, won’t they?

Only a few steps later I realized that the signs actually said Stop Afghanistan War, which was a relief, because I didn’t see any escorts who could deliver me through the crowd so that I could receive my needle treatment with minimal harassment.

Stop Afghanistan War, indeed. At this point, you might as well try to stop acupuncture.

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By Meredith – December 2, 2009

It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like… Um…

The neighbors across the street seem like festive folk. I’ve never talked to them — hell, after two years, I’ve never actually seen them. Their garbage magically appears on the curb; the snow and leaves are mysteriously whisked away. I believe they are middle-aged homebodies who, when needing to leave their home, scuttle out their back door and into their creaky mid-80s red Toyota, quickly, for fear of the ravages of fresh air and sunlight.

Yet I have warm, neighborly feelings towards them because of their year-round seasonal light displays that twinkle nightly in the windows of their second-floor veranda. Every month or so, a new motif: Hearts in February, eggs and bunnies in early spring, flowers in May, flags and fireworks in July, pumpkins and ghosts in October, turkeys and cornucopias in November. The light designs are evocative of decades past, with a corny garishness that would make anyone under the age of 50 wince. Witness December’s display:

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This is the same display that greeted us when we moved into our home two years ago this December. I remember looking out the window on our first night here and exclaiming, “My god, the neighbors have a phallus in their window!” (And yes, I did actually use the word ‘phallus.’) Mr. P concurred that the yellow-tinged candle with the orange billow of flame did, in fact, look terribly phallic. It was unmistakable, although my archaic digital camera cannot properly render the resemblance. Whenever I look out the window in the month of December, I think: Phallus.

So tonight, I came home from work and saw that the Thanksgiving lights had been replaced by the Christmas lights. And there it was, the Christmas phallus. ‘Tis the season.

lights2

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By Meredith – December 1, 2009

Ego Yoga

Today I did yoga for the first time in a week. Because yoga, strangely, never quite found a place within the Thanksgiving tradition.

Worried that my muscles had become taunt and sapless, I barricaded myself in my little study/makeshift studio and engaged in 90 minutes of power yoga, filled with endless vinyassas, continual downdogs, and unrelenting chaturanga dandasana. I opened my hips, bent my back, rolled my shoulders, twisted my chest, and splayed my limbs to the far corners of the Earth. I squatted, folded, balanced, stretched, extended, rolled, saluted, and stood perfectly still. I inhaled, and exhaled. Ahh, the conundrum of yoga. How can an activity that’s so physically taxing be so very restorative?

In the past year, I’ve steadily become addicted to yoga. I had feared that the initial rush of enthusiasm that blossomed after my first Ashtanga yoga class (which inspired me precisely because it left me a hobbled, sweaty mess) would abate after I realized just how much time, repetition, and leg strength was required to perfect all the cool-looking poses. Yoga isn’t all laying on the ground and thinking about kittens.

The first three months of yoga were a test, not only of my physicality but of my mentality. I had conditioned myself into believing that a punishing 6 mile run was a good workout, so adjusting to yoga forced me to reconsider what constitutes exercise. At first I felt lazy — look at me, laying on a mat instead of pounding the pavement! — but now, after 10 months of diligent, dedicated yoga practice, I am beginning to see the fruits of all of the time spent hunched over a mat. Like, no more knee aches, no more swollen ankles, better posture, better breathing, total anticipation of each and every yoga workout (as opposed to the chore-like dread of running), and some sleekness to my naturally-bulky muscles. I could touch my toes… then, I could lay my hands flat on the floor… now, I’m working on touching my nose to my knees without bending my legs or ripping my hamstring.

Even cooler, three weeks ago I finally pulled off a respectable Crane pose after hundreds of attempts. I could scarcely believe it when my feet rose off of the ground and my torso inexplicably stayed put. I felt a vague urge to break the staid concentration of the yoga class by drawing attention to my triumphant arm balance, but I was content to silently relish in having my knees securely perched within my armpits. Now, I can’t stop doing Crane pose. I even go into gratuitous Crane pose. In class, I glance around at my fellow participants, proud that I’m now in the elite club of Crane attainers. But I try not to let my head get too heavy, lest I topple over onto my face.

crane-pose

This is not me

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By Meredith – November 30, 2009

Hamsters for the Holiday

Isn’t it funny that I checked my own web site, half expecting it to be magically updated with details of my Thanksgiving holiday? But no, providing the words here is my job. Actually, I’m thankful for that control, because I can selectively censor out all of the weekend’s less-than-banner moments that appear to be feeding into an alarming stress-induced hair loss. This year, all I want for Christmas is a wig.

And, I didn’t even try to go shopping! But I guess my holiday plight was comparable to that of a Black Friday shopper, in that I stood in a line of cars on various turnpikes in anticipation of euphoric merry-making, only to reach my destination and find out… they were all out of the proverbial mechanical hamsters.

What’s up with this Zhu Zhu frenzy, anyway? As we breakfasted this morning, I found a CNN video of toy-store crowds clamoring for the Zhu Zhu hamster. Displays of rampant American shopping go over well at my breakfast table, and Mr. P and I chortled over the inanity of the consumer desperation. I must be rubbing off on my husband, because he uncharacteristically said “Crazy effing Americans.” People are lining up for squeaking, chirping, scooting robotic rodents. In some parts of the country, you know what people are lining up for? Government assistance checks. Medical care. Bread.

I guess it was too much to expect Americans to shuck off the chains of material want after a mere year-long recession. After all, the Zhu Zhu craze feels almost pious in its simplicity, and it’s cheap enough, with even the price-gouged Zhu Zhus still costing less than $45. Still, parents should perhaps forgo the Zhu Zhu and seek out this season’s real hard-to-find, gotta-have Christmas present for their tikes: the H1N1 flu shot. Merry Christmas, kids. Santa brought you inoculations!

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By Meredith – November 29, 2009

Thankstaking (2009)

Thanksgiving is nigh. It snuck up on me this year, what with my new job and various other time-sucking endeavors commanding all my idle thoughts. And the precious few free brain cycles are already focused on goddamn Christmas presents. Look what you’ve done to me, product peddlers of America! Are you happy that I’m so preoccupied with mentally dissecting the hidden material wants and needs of my family and friends that I can’t even fully focus on the impending gluttony of food, drink, and football?

Right now, I’m in the mental company of approximately 38.4 million other Americans, all focused on the same thing: traveling at least 50 miles to our chosen places of revelry. What I don’t understand is, if the U.S. population is 304 million, that means only 12% of us are on the move—so why is this slim minority so uniquely capable of overwhelming our entire transportation infrastructure?

Anecdotally, most adults claim to prefer Thanksgiving over Christmas, which is curious, considering how Thanksgiving has been demoted to a mere pitstop on the highway to Christmas mania. The turkey hasn’t even cooled before the Mariah Carey begins to howl, the decorations get yanked from the attic, and hundreds of thousands of bargain-hunters stampede into big-box stores, ready to club each other for door-buster TVs. Has the recession cooled our ardor for the Stuff Stampede—or will it only fan the flames?

A sampling of what I’m thankful for: that I have a rewarding full-time job at a company that will pay me to enjoy a four-day weekend with my loved ones. I’m thankful for my family and friends, who have so patiently humored my idiosyncrasies over the years. I’m thankful for mountains, for avocados, for snow, for Armani perfumes, for owls, for Nova on PBS, for my favorite light-blue sweater, for libraries, for Seinfeld reruns, for waking up each day with a sense of purpose and wonder.

But this year, as we offer up our annual tokens of gratitude, I wonder: who exactly takes all this thanks? We give the thanks… but to whom?

I picture it all spiraling into a void, a pit of Thankstaking, never to return. And it never, ever says, “You’re welcome.”

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By Meredith – November 25, 2009

Terrine de Pieds de Porc: A Love Story in Meat Paste

Yesterday, Mr. P undertook an ambitious culinary project: constructing a terrine de pieds de porc aux herbes.

Let’s begin with nomenclature. Pieds de porc—a phrase that floats off the tongue with rustic elegance—translates, rather devastatingly, to “pig’s feet.” Not to be confused with the quaintly euphemistic pieds de cochon, which the French sometimes use when naming restaurants. English, in its typical pragmatic shrug, calls them pig’s feet or trotters.

A terrine, for those who’ve not been emotionally wounded by one, is a sort of pâté pressed into an earnest-looking ceramic loaf pan. Think meatloaf, but make it Francophone.

I was once suspicious of such dishes, lumping them under the broad category of “questionable textures.” Then came a snowy lunch in the French Alps: two terrines (rabbit and pork) laid before me, no menu, no options. I was starving. I relented. Reader, I devoured. When the server arrived to clear them for the next course, I briefly considered throwing myself across the table in protest. Don’t bother with the stew. I’ve met my match.

So why pig’s feet? Our meat CSA occasionally offers “extras”—a euphemism that could mean organ meats or simply the parts that make you confront the living-ness of animals. This month, the more traditional cuts had been snapped up, so Mr. P returned from the pick-up with jowl, shank, and a frozen bag of what appeared to be—because they were—disembodied hooves. It was like receiving a special delivery from the witch in Hansel and Gretel.

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Pig’s feet are reportedly rich in gelatin, which is essential if you’re attempting a terrine that won’t collapse like a metaphor for modern life.

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Mr. P, undeterred by their anatomical frankness, did all the work. First, he soaked the feet overnight in salted water—something between a brine and a ritual. Then he boiled them, skimming the foamy byproduct that signals yes, this is how you make the kitchen smell like barn and broth at once.

imgp4153

Now, the aromatics. The French, of course, will not make soup without deploying an entire root system: leeks, celery, carrot, garlic. Parsley, tarragon, thyme. And a quantity of wine that feels not unlike bribing the dish to turn out well.

imgp4155

The feet—skinned, split, and singularly fleshy—were the stars. Into the stockpot they went, along with the jowl and shank, to simmer for hours until the meat surrendered.

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Bones were removed; broth was strained; flesh was seasoned and pressed into the terrine dish with the concentrated cooking liquid.

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Then came the hardest part: refrigeration. After a night of suspense, we sliced into it. The result? Dense, glistening, richly seasoned.

imgp4165

It leaned more rillette than terrine, Mr. P noted—though I lack the technical fluency to argue the point. It was tasty, fatty, shot through with herby depth and a kind of textural assertiveness that tells you gelatin did, in fact, show up.

A triumph. A gelatinous, porcine, oddly beautiful triumph. But let’s not forget where this all began: with the feet. Not figuratively—the actual feet of a fucking pig. Skinned, boiled, and disassembled like a bio lab project, only to reemerge the next day as something you might serve at a wine lunch in Provence.

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By Meredith – November 23, 2009

Cheese Smuggling for Dumb Blondes

We were strategizing how to smuggle cheese back into America after our upcoming French vacation. Real love is planning crimes together.

Ultimately, the whole conspiracy was moot—the U.S. Customs site says hard cheeses are “generally admissible,” which is the kind of intentionally vague phrasing that gives full authority to whatever Border Patrol agent is working the 5 a.m. shift at JFK and how charitably he views your dairy.

But the plotting was good for us. It’s healthy for a marriage to work through high-stakes hypotheticals. And crucially, I refused to let Mr. P take any risk. His lawful presence here depends on never becoming a name in a federal database. Me, though?

“Here’s the plan,” I said, after we circled through the options. “I pack the cheese. We buy legal foie gras at Charles de Gaulle. We declare the foie at U.S. Customs. You hand it to the officer like a fancy bribe. The foie is the decoy. The cheese sails through unnoticed.”

“And if they search your bag?” he asked.

“I say I didn’t know cheese was dairy.”

He stared at me. “What?”

“Think about it,” I said. “The form probably says ‘no dairy.’ So I act confused. ‘Wait… cheese is dairy?’” I widened my eyes. “‘I thought dairy was, like, milk.’”

“They’ll never buy that.”

“Oh, sweetheart,” I said. “You’re too smart to understand how fucking dumb some people are. I guarantee there are Americans out there who genuinely don’t know cheese is dairy.”

He still looked skeptical.

“They are not handing out $10,000 fines to some tall, confused blonde who thinks dairy means milk and packed a 10-pound cheese wheel by accident. That’s not a threat. That’s a sitcom.”

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By Meredith – November 22, 2009

Unfriended: Not the Word We Wanted, but the Word We Deserve

The New Oxford American Dictionary declared unfriend the Word of the Year for 2009—a verb that needs no footnote to anyone who’s ever added a co-worker out of politeness and then recoiled at their updates about gout, MLM schemes, or soup.

Sure, some use unfriending as a passive-aggressive form of social theater. Not me. I keep my friends close and my enemies visible, ideally within reach of their Farmville yields and Mafia Wars stats.

I’m not a compulsive Facebooker, but I do a weekly lurk. I did once unfriend a girl from high school I’d spoken to exactly twice—she kept posting real-time dispatches from the heart of an abusive relationship. “He’s yelling at me right now and the kids are crying!” And the most disturbing part? I didn’t feel concern. Just… disgusted voyeurism, like a stranger had flashed me on the subway. So I banished her. Click. “I smite thee from thine orb of cohorts.”

Of the other nominees for Word of the Year, I had a soft spot for intexticated (because it’s delightful to say), funemployed (because it sounds like a state of grace), birther (because that entire sideshow felt like a failed SNL sketch), and teabagger (because, well, I’m not made of stone). As for tramp stamp—lexicographers may just be catching on, but the rest of us have been trading that gem since dial-up.

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By Meredith – November 19, 2009