My Drug of Choice

I drank coffee for about 10 years, on and off, and then seriously on (think working as a barista and swigging five cups a day), until about age 22. At that point in my life, I became convinced that caffeine was, if not a driving force behind my high levels of anxiety, then at least an exacerbating one. Never did it occur to me that maybe the sheer fact of being 22 and on my own for the first time in my life might have been more anxiety-inducing than some roasted beans, but that's water under the bridge, I suppose. So I quit cold turkey (and hot coffee) one day, and though I would very occasionally grab some decaf here and there, I even felt that the trace amounts of caffeine in that were too much for my sensitive system. When I quit eating chocolate, I think it was safe to say I had developed what a mental health professional might deem "cafephobia."

Things pretty much stayed this way for about another decade, until one day when a well-meaning coworker picked me up a "decaf" that turned out to be a "caf." Amazingly, my head did not explode in a supernova of stress. Sure, I felt jittery and a little edgy, but there were no lasting repercussions to speak of, obviously. Nevertheless, I pretty much avoided the black stuff for the next few years, up until a few weeks ago.

It's funny, at the toughest period of my son's newborn period, as he slept all day and saved his waking (read: screaming) hours for the dark of night, I never ducked into a Starbucks, even at that deadly period from about 2 to 4 p.m. on weekdays—when my eyelids were as heavy as sandbags in the back of a Vermont pickup truck straining up an icy hill in late February. (Yes, Virginia, it is possible to overdo a metaphor.) No, it wasn't until almost a year and a half later, just last month, when I dipped my proverbial toe into the water of life.

And while I haven't taken up java as a daily habit, I probably have three days or so per week when I do drink it. Maybe it's because my body/mind has such a low tolerance for caffeine (ever hear of a coffee lightweight? That'd be this guy), but it is a total high for me. I feel amazing. I can feel the surge of energy in my blood. Yes, I'm jittery, but my eyes are wide open, I feel I can create. Hell, writing this "under the influence" is much easier than it would be in my normal torpor. When I listen to music, it sounds better, dramatically so. I like people more. Could it be that someone has been spiking the coffee grounds with ecstasy? I can't imagine what kind of mischief I would get up to on that drug, or anything harder than a cappucino. Which of course leads you to ask if coffee is my gateway drug? Hmm. I kinda doubt it. Considering that I had to take two Maalox tablets on Sunday to cope with the effects of 1.5 mugs of regular coffee, I think I'll get my drugs from the local cafe, not the alley behind it.

Please leave a comment below if you have a minute or two. I'd love to hear how coffee makes you feel and if any drugs (legal and otherwise) "do it" for you.

A Smart Take on the Democrats' Denver Circus

My friend Philip Baruth, who teaches at UVM and is the author of several fine novels, has developed a great blogging niche for himself with the Vermont Daily Briefing. Currently, he's blogging for Vermont's largest paper, The Burlington Free Press, from Denver, on the Democratic Convention. I think you'll find his posts both informative and entertaining. I especially like his most recent post on the mainstream-media obsession with a Clinton-Obama war and the offbeat activism of Richard Dreyfuss. Go Philip!

Here's Philip with Minnesota comedian and current senatorial candidate Al Franken (Philip's on the right :-0)

Amazing Storytelling Podcast

For the most amazing stories—funny, sad, scary, and much more—check out The Moth podcast. I've listened to five so far (Richard Price, Randy Cohen, Ed Gavagan, Todd Hanson, and Bokara Legendre) and they've all been absolutely brilliant.

Coincidence, or Something Else?

About once a month, I would estimate, I have the bizarre experience of hearing, seeing, speaking, or writing a word at the very moment (or within seconds) of encountering that very same word through other means. For example, I was heading to the hardware store to buy a propane tank for our gas grill. I got in the car, the radio came on, and a BBC British voice immediately uttered the word "propane" as a part of a story he was doing on gas production in Russia. It's like this every time.

Just five minutes ago, I was listening to a podcast and the narrator described a person as "pathetic" not one second after I typed the word "pathetic" into my instant messenger window.

I'm not a superstitious person. I don't believe in or adhere to any religious customs. And yet there's something beyond the conscious realm connecting here, I'm quite sure of that. So I ask you, dear reader, what's going on?

Quote of the Day #5

"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."
- Milan Kundera

I-93 South @ 5:15 p.m.: WTF?

I'm not going to go on some holier-than-thou environmentalist rant here. Let's just get that straight.

Anyway, I just drove home from work for the first time in quite awhile. I've been biking on most sunny days and T-ing it when it rains. But due to an off-site meeting today, I drove. And just as it always does—whenever I have the misfortune of driving southbound down Boston's lovely section of Interstate 93—the road looked like a Wal-Mart parking lot. I know the Big Dig connects previously isolated neighborhoods and is a huge improvement over the crappy mess of elevated roads we had before, but it cost $14.6 billion and this is what we get?

If I'm an ungrateful jerk and totally off-base here, please comment and let me know. I don't mind whining, but I want to at least be right.

Quote of the Day #4

"Success is not fame or money or the power to bewitch. It is to have created something valuable from your own individuality and skill—a garden, an embroidery, a painting, a cake, a life."

- Abraham Lincoln

50 Amazing Online Writing Tools

Check out this incredible list of writing tools I found using StumbleUpon. It's 50 tools, ranging from alternative word processors to spell checkers to a program that generates writing prompts for you. All of the items on the list are open source, so anyone can use them for free. Some days I really love the Internet.

Quote of the Day #3

"[Americans have] always thought of education as good if it gets you a better job, but bad if it makes you think too much."
- Susan Jacoby

The Omnivore's Dilemma

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
The Omnivore's Dilemma, as author Michael Pollan sees it, is the horrendously complicated process of how Americans today go about answering the simple question of what to have for dinner. Fortunately, we have a writer as skilled as Pollan to uncover what happens to our food before it gets to our mouths, and how we can use the knowledge we gain along the way to nourish our bodies as well as our minds. Subtitled A Natural History of Four Meals, the book tells us not just what we're eating, but where it comes from, how it gets to our plates, and what impact those processes have on the world we live in.

Pollan's genius is in both how he structures the book and how he uses the characters behind each meal to engage the reader; it's clear this guy knows a thing or two about storytelling, not to mention food.

Those with a weak stomach, be warned: Part I, in which we are introduced to the industrial food chain that flows on a "river of corn," is a tough read. Most of us know in the deeply denied backs of our minds that life for a steer on a factory farm is pretty grim, and as Pollan follows "cow 534" from ranch to feedlot, even the most carnivorous among us may lose our appetites. But it's not just the treatment of animals one finds troubling here; it's the degree to which our entire food chain is awash in corn, and the implications that has for public health, the environment, and the economy of the Heartland, that is most unpalatable.

To bring the point home, we meet George Naylor, the Iowa farmer who understands exactly what he's doing as he sells corn for less and less money every year, why his grandfather's multi-crop farm made so much more sense, and ultimately, why he can't afford to change anything he's doing.

One's appetite improves somewhat in Part II, which takes us through the world of "Big Organic," or as Pollan dubs this section's meal, "supermarket pastoral." On the one hand, the more we buy from large-scale organic farms, the supposedly healthier our food is, not to mention the people working the fields where pesticides aren't sprayed, and the waters in which chemical fertilizers don't wind up killing all of the downstream marine life. Unfortunately, all that organic produce we feel so virtuous for buying? It's shipped thousands of miles in many cases, particularly to those of us on the East Coast, and the carbon footprint created is significant.

Gene Kahn comes to symbolize the contradictions at the heart of Big Organic. Once a pioneering hippie founder of the organic movement, Kahn is now a General Mills vice president running Cascadian Farms, the massive organic operation that supplies a great deal of what we purchase at Whole Foods.

And then, as soon as have a grasp of what big business has done to our food system, Pollan takes an abrupt left turn in Part III, and spends about 100 pages talking about grass farming. Yep, from the point of view of Joel Salatin, the "Christian-conservative-libertarian-environmentalist-lunatic farmer," it's all about what you do with a pasture. Salatin's Polyface Farm becomes in many ways, the ideal the book is searching for. It's practically off the grid, but it still finds a way to prosper economically because its efficiencies aren't dictated by the free market; they're based on how nature itself works. By harmonizing Polyface's operations with the natural world, Salatin is a throwback, but given what Pollan has to say about the meal, this crazy farmer is doing something right.

The fourth and final meal occupies the rest of the book, and since it's primarily acquired by hunting and gathering, two omnivorous dilemmas are central to Part IV: the ethics of meat eating and, with respect to mushrooms, how do we know which ones won't kill us? Pollan devotes a great deal of energy (and angst) to the first question, and it's a great service to all of us who've ever flirted with vegetarianism. The second question, in which he ventures to the top of the snowy Sierras to forage for fungi, is no less fascinating. As are his hunting and foraging companions. One of these is Angelo Garro, a Sicilian archetype of the "slow food" movement, who guides the author through the sometimes bloody world of the 21st-century hunter-gatherer, at least as far as one who resides in Berkeley, California, can be spoken of in such terms. Ultimately, Pollan's "last supper" is probably the most satisfying, but it requires the most work on his part, and as he points out, it's not an option for most of us. What is an option, now that we've learned where our food comes from, is to make more conscious choices about what we eat. We may just figure out what to have for dinner after all.

View all my reviews.

Quote of the Day #2

"In the 21st century, nations don't invade other nations."
-John McCain, August 2008

New News Source, Old News Story

The following video I just got from a friend lasts about four and a half minutes, but it asks some really important questions about U.S. counterterrorism strategy in the days following the sentencing of Osama Bin Laden's driver.



Beyond this video, I was very pleased to find LinkTV, which looks like a great news source for those of us who want to know more about the world outside America's borders. I plan on checking it out much more soon.

Travelers' Laptops May Be Seized Without Cause

The Washington Post has some of the most chilling U.S. political news to come along in actually quite awhile. And that's truly saying something, given the proclivity of our government to run roughshod over the Constitution and those of us who used to enjoy basic rights such as freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom to keep our damn private lives private. Anyway, the latest bit of crap disguised as reasoned policy is that "Federal agents may take a traveler's laptop computer or other electronic device to an off-site location for an unspecified period of time without any suspicion of wrongdoing, as part of border search policies the Department of Homeland Security recently disclosed." In case you missed it, there's a crucial clause in there: without any suspicion of wrongdoing. Apparently, it would be too much bother to actually have to come up with a valid reason for taking a citizen's private property for however long one of these DHS hacks sees fit. Remember when the government at least pretended to care about such anachronisms as due process and warrants? Most likely, those affected will just look like they might have something sweet on their laptops such as Grand Theft Auto IV or the entire Jonas Brothers collection. You know, something a DHS bozo might want to inspect, burn, and then return. But really, what's to stop these criminals from targeting anyone who appears to have a political agenda not sanctioned by the regime in power? I'm thinking about peace activists, political bloggers, and other "subversives." Let's see how quickly those folks have their computers snatched. If he were alive now, George Orwell never would have been able to finish 1984 before some clown with a badge would have "accidentally erased" his hard drive.

Quote of the Day #1

"Money may be the husk of many things, but not the kernel. It brings you food, but not appetite; medicine but not health; acquaintances, but not friends; servants, but not loyalty; days of joy, but not peace or happiness."

-Henrik Ibsen

July and August Fun

in photos! Here are some highlights:




To see the whole album, visit my Fotki page.

The Senate Doesn't Make Toys, It Makes Them Safer

It's a good day when the U.S. government, against huge industry opposition, actually does something for its citizens. Last week, the House passed the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 by a vote of 424-1. Not to be outdone, the Senate then promptly passed the bill 89-3. Here's what this law will do:

• Make toy regulations mandatory, which means that magnets and many other hazards will be subject to the new law's centerpiece third-party testing requirement;
  
• Ban six toxic phthalates in children's products. Three are banned permanently. Three would then be subject to a CPSC scientific review, but are banned until it is completed.
  
• Grant private-sector employees protection as whistleblowers.
  
• Establish a public database of potential hazards.
  
• Require that choking hazards be disclosed in Internet advertising.

As a parent, I have to say that it's a relief to not have to worry quite as much about the toys my child will come into contact with. Let's just hope that President Bush, facing overwhelming support in Congress, has the sense to sign this sensible, if overdue, piece of legislation.

'It's (Gonna Be) a Long Cold Lonely Winter...'

Apologies to George Harrison for this post's headline, but apparently last year's brutal oil bills were just an opening act. At $4.70 per gallon (up significantly from the '07 average of $2.59), now may be the time to switch to gas heat. This is from today's Boston Globe:

"Just how dire the situation will become is hard to predict, though many in the oil industry say the home heating oil-dependent region is on the brink of a crisis - if not already in one. New England is much more dependent on oil heat than the rest of the country. About 8 million US households use oil heat, with Massachusetts alone accounting for nearly 1 million of those homes." Read more...

(Image: CartoonStock.com)