Shout outs to my alma maters

This clip from the HuffPost calls my first alma matter one of the 10 preppiest colleges in the US (and thus, probably, the world).

And this is a really funny clip from SNL. If you watch real close, you'll see my 2nd alma mater featured in the background. It's around the 2 minute mark. "Sarah Palin" is calling SAISers part of the "elite."

I have mixed feelings about these schools I attended. I have a lot of complaints about both of them, but I'm happy/proud to have graduated from them.

First, looking back, these schools were waaaay to expensive for me. Especially the 2nd one. It'll take me many, many years to pay off the student loans. I should have known better - that's why they can afford to be elitist. But I guess it taught me to continue seeing things from different angles, not just one, and to keep being myself. The elitist queen that I am.

Recipe becomes reality

I know this isn't a food blog, but it's my blog, so I'm bound to talk about food and recipes every once in a while. I invented a recipe! After years of thinking about it, I've finally just gone ahead and made it. Here it is.

Take a pork tenderloin, rub it with sinigang mix (tamarind soup base), it doesn't need to be marinated, and throw it in a 350 degree oven for 35 mins. Let it rest with a foil over it for 10 minutes. Cut it up, and eat it.

I served the roast sinigang tenderloin with pasta, green beans and tomatoes with a dash of oregano, a drizzle of olive oil, a healthy dose of salt, and a big splash of lemon. Buon appetito!

Diets are still for chumps

My loving spouse pointed out that I don't appear to be very understanding to people who want to go on diets. He thinks I should blame "the man" more than "the people." And I do think the whole diet industry deserves the bulk of the blame (no pun intended). But I also think that people should take responsibility for themselves. I'll throw my spouse a bone. Maybe I am a special case because I find nutrition very interesting and I also enjoy fruits, vegetables, and cooking.

I learned pretty much everything I know about nutrition from my high school health class. I took it during summer school and it was by far my favorite class ever. We learned about the birds and the bees, STDs, nutrition, and other things. It made me want to become a nutritionist, especially one that works on projects around the US and abroad to figure out the best way to feed people that don't have a lot of resources. It also made me aware of food labels, calories, and the US food pyramid.

Maybe I should cash in on my nutrition interest and become part of the industry, preaching my no-nonsense approach to food and eating!!

Diets are for chumps

I probably have no real place saying this* (which is why I have a blog) but I have always thought that diets - it doesn't matter which ones - are lame and don't work. Maybe I'm missing the point about diets, but I think it's dumb for one to spend time and money purposefully denying oneself certain foods in certain quantities and/or to try to fool oneself into thinking that doing this will make one lose weight.

People on diets spend an inordinate time talking and worrying about food. They talk about how much they like certain fatty foods but they can never eat them again because they are bad for them. And of course, it's natural that they fall off the wagon. Or is it on the wagon? But what they really need is to learn basic nutrition. People aren't taught nutrition - it's not common knowledge in the U.S. In other places, like in Italy and Japan and France, where it seems like people are doing well re: their obesity rates, there's a strong food culture/history.

But what's even worse about dieters and diets is the whole diet industry behind it all. All those individually wrapped, enticingly-labeled bars, shakes, bars, cereals, frozen meals, etc. The bottom line is that they are processed foods created in a lab. Why isn't it more natural for us to simply grow food, rinse some of the dirt off, peel it, and sometimes cook it (for the harder-to-process foods), and just stick it in our mouths and chew? I mean, good grief, what IS soda and why do people drink it as if it's water?!

And I do treat myself to random treats like those infamous chocolate sandwich cookies and ice cream and potato chips. After all, we do live in a modern society full of such edible wonders so I would just be denying progress if I didn't indulge once in a while. I'm glad I never really developed a taste for/dependence on processed foods. Hopefully that means I will never have to diet.

And don't even get me started on "going to the gym."

* I have been told that I have been blessed with a fast metabolism, which is true, because I do eat a lot, but I truly believe that eating well trumps metabolism.

Early spring day

There are so many things in my life to look forward to.

- Having babies some day. Smart, beautiful, curious, well-behaved, grounded, confident, multilingual babies.

- Career. Work abroad, politics, climbing the ladder, choosing my next steps, getting paid for it.

- Travel. Niagara with husband, Montreal, Paris, Japan, Portugal, London, New Zealand, overwater bungalows...

- Activities. Learning Farsi/Arabic, Tagalog, perfecting Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian...

- Bike rides

- Trying delicious, crazy new foods/drinks I have never dreamed of - like the lard chunks cooked in milk my Croatian friend described to me

- Wearing perfect dresses on perfect days

- Enjoying random kindness of/to strangers

- Self-deprecating humor

- Meeting/ spending time with true friends

- Living: In new/different countries, houses, making plans and taking detours

- Living at peace with myself

- Having that falling-in-love feeling about life.

(Written during my lunch hour, in the sun, in the park, while in a really good mood. I'll read this over again periodically to remind myself that I am LIVING)

Growing pains

So, it just happened. I get to go abroad for a few months, and I'm very excited. All I can say is, be nice to everyone and work really hard. At least, in this situation, because I work with awesome people, it is possible to be recognized by a) being nice and b) working hard. Yay! That's how I got this opportunity. Even though I haven't gone yet, I'm plotting my next opportunity.

For the first time in my life, I am seeing myself as a career girl. I'm not just doing a job for experience and/or money. I'm investing in my career, and thinking in terms of "career moves." I'm taking advantage of the opportunities my current job has to offer, and thinking of how they could fit in to my larger career goals, how they might make me more marketable, or help me move into a different field. For example, I'm studying Farsi on my job's dime, so that maybe one day I can work on Middle East issues. And I'm thinking of how my husband and I can live/work abroad as a team. When I look at my job this way, as an investment in a career, a 30+ year-long trajectory of 40 hour work weeks, it makes what I do on a daily basis more exciting and meaningful.

I think about how hard it was to get to this point. I think about my first day at my first grown-up job, and how, after orientation, when I was left to my own devices, and I was given my first assignment, to formulate a written response to a request, my gut was telling me to run away as fast as I could. I felt like I didn't belong in a cube, at a desk, in front of a computer that wasn't mine. The cube was dull and lifeless, I was surrounded by strangers, and I didn't have a definite end date, like I had always had for school. I felt like all of my previous work/academic experience made me unfit for this job, because in all those years I went to school I never learned how to sit in a cube and be a worker bee. Instead, I was taught that I should strive to be original, and explore ideas that intrigued me, and that my ideas were important, and interesting, and that I should try to understand other perspectives to enrich my understanding of a particular topic. But the most basic knowledge, the stuff I learned in kindergarten and at home, is pretty much the only knowledge you need to be a good worker bee: play nice and follow directions.

Luckily, I can explore my individuality and creativity through the random emails I send my coworkers, lunchtime chit chat, and blogging. Maybe one day I can better incorporate those qualities into my career. At least, that's the goal.

Barbie's dream home

Having a house will probably not happen in the next five years, but hopefully the hubs and I will both have some good work experience under our belts by that time comes and we'll be prepared for house-buying and other next steps. I can picture two dream houses. One house is a cottage-type dwelling, with a garden patio, gynormous kitchen with a deep Italian-tiled sink, in a hipster area of town, a mix of authentic, established locals and cool, social newcomers, in a place with a moderate climate (Chile, California, ok I guess DC but only because there are jobs), with access to a farmers market, and some kind of body of water nearby like a lake or stream. It would be a simple, comfortable, cozy house, and it would smell like espresso and nutella all the time.

The other dream house is a vacation house that I can transport from place to place at whim, a pretty bare-bones place, probably made of concrete, that contains a sink, some hammock hooks in the ceiling, a tiled bathroom fitted with a toilet and a bidet, an outdoor shower with a view to something (ocean, lake, valley, mountains), and a wireless internet connection. I could put the house on a Caribbean island when I felt like going to the beach, deep in the red-dusted interior of Brazil when I felt like escaping a harsh winter, in the Philippines when I wanted to visit my grandma and learn Tagalog, somewhere in Chile so I could spend time with my in-laws and we could all relax together, and anywhere else my friends happen to be so I can visit them. I think of all the impossible things I could want, this crazy dream house is it.

Maybe I could construct a chain of these dwellings all over the world and rent them out to people trying to live the dream. There would be some type of reservation system involved, and the local people that live in those areas could earn money constructing/maintaining/cleaning the dwellings. Yeah, leave it to an American to try to concoct a way to McDonaldize a dream like that.

Next Steps

My husband and I just had a conversation about next steps yesterday. We had a nice serious talk and we ended up with a plan on my next steps. Cleverly, now that I think of it, he got away without drawing up a clear plan for himself - he shifted the focus to my plan instead.

First, I need a mentor.

Also, I need to inquire about going abroad for work. It would be convenient for me because two of my friends (and pretty soon, three) live in one of the places where I could go. It's as simple as me going and asking someone, hey, what's the next step to get there? But for the past month I've been biting my tongue. Next steps can be scary. If I could just take my husband with me, going abroad for work would be perfect. But it's only 10 weeks or so. I know I could manage without him, especially with friends over there.

Now I need to bug my husband about his next steps. He graduated from college 6 years ago, and he wants to get an advanced degree. At this rate, he very well might be the oldest person in his class - the weird guy that has a kid and a whole other life, besides going to school. I remember there was only ONE guy like that in my grad program in Italy and just a) being in awe that a person can still be a student in their 30s with a bunch of crazy young whippersnappers without running away in frustration - don't they know everything by now anyway? and b) wondering how they can balance the expensive business of supporting a family with the very unproductive activity of studying.

Go fork yourself

One day last summer, I joined some coworkers to have lunch outdoors in a lovely park with a duck pond. As we settled into our table and took out our lunches, I realized that I didn't bring a fork with me. I excused myself and went in search of a fork. It probably took me 8 minutes to return to that duck pond park, but it felt like an eternity. First I went to the hot dog cart. I waited a few seconds for the few tourists in line to decide what they wanted to order, and I asked the proprietor if he had a fork. He said no. I suspect he may have been lying, because I was not a paying customer (I didn't have a wallet on me, either). I ran to a nearby food court, sure that I could find forks lying around next to the condiment stations, but I needed a friggin' i.d. to get into the food court building because it's a federal building!! grrrr. (no wallet). So I ran in the opposite direction to find a restaurant that would have forks lying around. I found a cafe 2 blocks away. It's a chain where you get soup and sandwich combos. I ran to the condiment/drink station. They only had silverware! No plastic forks! I took a quick look around a grabbed a real fork. I clutched it tightly in my hand, and I got out of that place, feeling extremely guilty. I told myself and my coworkers that I'd "give the fork back someday." Last week I visited the restaurant for the first time since. I didn't bring the fork with me. I use the fork all the time for eating my lunch at work. Maybe one day when I switch jobs, or move, I'll return to the restaurant and bring back the fork. Maybe. Or maybe they can just fork themselves. I got really annoyed and hungry that hot, humid summer day, during my lunch hour, in hot pursuit of a fork. Things like that shouldn't be so difficult! Or maybe they shouldn't put me out so much. Once I finally got to eat, though, with the aid of my stolen fork, and my blood sugar had been restored to normal, I felt pretty ok.

Soy cobarde

I ate meat last weekend. I had to. I'm too polite. If someone wants to share their food with me, I won't refuse them. Unless the food would kill me. I did avoid the bacon when we had pancakes, though. And I cooked a lot of chicken this week for my husband because he needed bland food for his tummy - some kind of stomach bug or something.

So far, feeling good! Actually, this past week I was feeling so happy I surprised myself.

From whence it came

I went for the extremely tangy probiotic yogurt with W. Va. honey and granola.

Last month when I was visiting my mom I thought she had gone slightly off the deep end for giving up sweets along with her church. In my case I don't have a pastor telling me to do it, it's the strange feeling I had kind of on my own. But maybe this was in response to a group of memories/thoughts/ideas/environmental cues my subconscious has been collecting for who knows how long:

• My mom having gone off deep end
• Knowing Lent was around the corner
• Watching Food, Inc., King of Corn, This American Life episode on pig farms
• Reading Michael Pollan
• Looking for something to blog about

Anyways, I shouldn't look askance at my mom, but I can tell you that she did not stick to it! She munched sugary sweets throughout my visit. It's ok, it's because I'm a special occasion.

Tomorrow: breaking bread with relatives. Will I, for the first time ever, inconvenience them based on my food choices?! My secret will probably have to get out, depending on what they serve for dinner, and I don't want the deluge of questions - why? but you're not Catholic? huh?

I just know they're going to have chicken or sausage or something.

Today is the greatest

Peanut butter and raspberry jam english muffins for breakfast, along with multivitamin and some weird probiotic drink. Stir-fry leftovers for lunch (this is a recurring theme with me, today's lunch is yesterday's dinner), some green grapes, a few chips. Sushi dinner with husband and friend. Best edamame ever. I was full 2 hours ago, now I'm hungry again. We'll see if I go for the ice cream or the loads of chocolate kisses.

In other words, not eating chicken/beef/pork/etc. = hungry every 2 hours. We'll see if that changes with a little time.

I just remembered, I already had dessert at the sushi restaurant. tapioca and ice cream. Hrmm.

I'm actually kind of craving a banana right now. And I don't even like bananas.

February 17 and 18

After grocery store trip made lovely Connecticut-sourced scallops (only traveled 142 miles from ocean to my plate) with asparagus, arugula, olive oil, parmesan pasta. Next day, I would occasionally conjure up the sweet taste and sigh with nostalgia. I had the leftover pasta, sans scallops, for lunch and was ravenous 2 hours later. I munched on a chocolate brownie Luna Bar and made it home without gnawing the leather straps of my bag. I made two dinners - french fry omelette (leftover from the Peruvian place) and seitan brocolli carrot stir fry with brown rice. Once satisfied, I told my husband that he had survived a day without meat (I had also packed the veggie pasta for his lunch - he ended up eating half an expired snickers bar, one year past its expiration he noticed after consuming half of it and detecting something was amiss). He is still in denial about it. Every day that goes by without him having meat, a little piece of his soul dies, so he claims. I've probably claimed 4 little pieces in the 9 1/2 years we've been a couple. Let's see how many more I can collect.

I was "hungry" a few hours later and had Ben & Jerry's ice cream - some Chunky Monkey and some Phish Food. Animal-themed ice cream.

The Fat Tuesday

Celebrated the final day of excess by coming home from work/school, ravenous, at 10pm, munching on chicken that my husband so thoughtfully brought home for me. Chicken was from our fave cheap take-out place, offering Peruvian style chicken roasting on spits. The idea of becoming a Lenten ouvo-lacto-pescatarian had been percolating in my head, and I secretly plotted a grocery store trip to stock my pantry with some meatless edibles.

Lenten Vegetarian

My husband isn't going to be too happy when he finds out about this, but I've decided that for Lent this year I'm going to be a vegetarian. Make that an ouvo-lacto-pescatarian. I'm not Catholic, I'm just looking for something to do and trying to show solidarity with my Catholic brethren and sisteren. I like to call my husband a "Catholic of convenience" because he's agnostic 99.9% of the time but when someone talks about Catholicism in terms of Pope John Paul II or religion as national identity he likes to point out that he's from a "Catholic country" and knows what the religion's about because he has been to mass a few times. I have also been to mass a few times, once in Spanish and once in English, and I had no idea what was going on but I liked it.

My Catholic friends are at their most Catholic during Lent, because they like to talk about what they've given up. Yesterday, they would have walked around with ash on their foreheads, like Mr. Toothy Grin, aka our current Vice President.

But yesterday I read about this calendar and was inspired to fast/pray/give in my own way. And blog about it. We'll see how it goes, but as of today I have been staying strong and avoiding meat. Although tonight, on the way home from sushi dinner with husband and friend I smelled hamburger grilling and I knew right away that I wanted one. This is going to be an interesting 40-some-odd days.

Update: I just saw some articles about a British broadcaster that wondered aloud, on air, whether Biden had bruised his forehead on the ice while attending the Winter Olympics. That's embarrassing. And she's Catholic.

Mr. Reubens

I love Pee-wee Herman so much. I’m sure there are still tons of other fans out there. (I found out that he’s still performing live, so yeah, the fans are out there). I remember I used to like him as a child, but even today when I watch him he makes me smile immediately. He is so funny and goofy. I need to look up more stuff about him. I’m watching Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, which was directed by Tim Burton. I really enjoy his work. Recently, while visiting my niece, I discovered that she’s also a fan of all movies Tim Burton. She has fantastic taste and she’s only turning seven next week. I’m such a proud auntie. I think I’ll have to buy her a Tim Burton collection as a gift. It’s worth looking into, especially since her birthday’s coming up. My favorite movie last year was Fantastic Mr. Fox, which is by another one of my favorite directors, Wes Anderson. But it's too soon for it to be out on DVD.

Update on Pee-wee: He’s enjoyed a resurgence since his unfortunate arrest in 1991. Hopefully I can see him in his live show one day, but he might be coming out with a movie soon. Meanwhile, I can still try to hunt down reruns of his old show on TV.

Whenever I want you all I have to do

My husband and I had the same dream at the same time. Well, the subject and some of the characters were the same. He dreamt that we were in the airport about to check into a flight to Japan when I magically gave birth to a baby girl. So his concern is that we don't have documentation to prove that we are in fact the parents and they might call the authorities to take her away and we would get in big trouble for trying to bring a baby to another country (like those missionaries with the Haitian children). Happily, though, it seems obvious to all involved that we fit the bill of a nice family, we are not questioned, and our travel plans proceed without a hitch.

Meanwhile, I was busy dreaming that I had checked into a huge mansion-like hospital full of antique furniture, persian carpets, and plain clothes nurses and doctors because I had what appeared (and felt) to be a bit of a swollen and stretched belly that seemed to be more a result of a large meal rather than a full term pregnancy. Anyway, supposedly I was in labor and they had me relax in one of their well-appointed hospital rooms. After lounging comfortably there for a while it was deemed that I was no longer in labor and they released me. To do what, I do not know.

In the middle of the night, after waking from my dream, I woke up my husband and told him that I had dreamt I was pregnant. And imagine my surprise when he told me that in his dream we had a baby girl. Strange. This hasn't been my first pregnant dream, but the timing for this one was more than a little eerie.

Stream of Consciousness

I have now officially entered my 4th decade. How old does that make me sound?! I can tell you that I am a neon-loving child of the 80s, I entered my awkward teen years in the awkward 90s, I "grew up" in the 00s (a decade I still haven't evaluated), and now here we are in this brand new decade. What will define this decade for my generation, my country?

What can I say about the 00s. To me it doesn't feel like a decade has passed since the magical mystical year 2000. As a high schooler I thought it was so cool to be part of the class of 2000. That was the year I moved across the country to go to college, the year I met that man that would be my husband. College went by way too fast but I can tell you it was fun. Not in a wild way but in a wow, I can really do whatever I want when I want now kind of way. During the 00s I think I was trying to learn about things that interested me and figure out how I can make a living doing things that weren't too terribly boring to me. After college I thought it was my calling to help people so I volunteered a lot and worked with a lot of kids. Then I moved to DC and immersed myself in international relations. Now I've been working in a part of my field I had never imagined myself in before.

The past decade brought a lot of surprises, almost all of them good. It also simultaneously expanded and divided my family unit. I hope that this decade we can become more cohesive. For my personal life I hope for more, mostly good, surprises. So 2010s, please surprise and entertain me. I'm a child of the 80s, you know, MTV generation, ADD, pop culture, instant gratification, so clearly I need to be entertained.

Going places

It's almost a year to the day of my previous post. Whoops. I don't know how that happened. And it doesn't seem like I have much to report on the past year, exactly. But my blog has never really been about chronicling my life. It's more about thoughts I want to share.

Lately my thoughts have been focused on traveling. I want to go to at least one foreign country per year. This year I went to Chile. It was my 4th time, and my shortest visit ever (just 10 days!). But this time I went to a part of Chile I've never visited before, because although it's a territory of Chile it's over 2,000 miles away from the continent in the middle of the Pacific Ocean (Easter Island or Isla de Pascua). I loved the breezes bringing their smells of broth and sun-soaked volcanic rock. I loved hearing the Pascuense language, witnessing the intensity of the song and dance we saw there, ogling the tattoos (I never thought that the upper thigh could be a good site for one), and imagining that the moai could talk and walk when you least expected it (I can reproduce their groan "...uufff").

For 2010 I'm thinking Japan in the fall. I picture steaming bowls of ramen, hot spring soaks, temples, haunting scenery, mind-boggling crowds, intense orderliness, and crazy Japanese-to-English translations. I'm always thinking about future trips!

Conundrum

When I throw away underwear because it's in a state of disrepair, and it's worn, can I just throw it in the wastebin or do I have to wash it first and then throw it away? It feels disrespectful and unsanitary to throw away worn underdrawers.

Sometimes I have these questions and they remind me of something that Larry David would wonder aloud about on his show. Before becoming a fan of the show, who would have thought that I could identify so closely with a middle-aged bald Jewish man? Certainly not I. But it just goes to show you the universality of the human condition. Or at least the shared experience and camaraderie within the neurotic U.S.-American diaspora.