Breaded Tofu Nuggets of Forgiveness (A Recipe)...

You have had a very challenging day with your six-year-old. You fantasize about running away from home; contemplate belatedly putting him up for adoption and how you will break this news to him ("This just isn't working out..."). This boy of yours - with eyes like your eyes, you have heard, your first and only born - giggles with sadistic glee each time he manages to get under your skin today, which is often but not without skill on his part, and you start to see a flicker of the teenager him, with his cool indifference to your pain.

Still, he is six and he does not like to see his mother crying, hopelessly tangled in a knot of
merging highways from four directions in the distant suburbs, a bitter reminder to her that the suburbs are the Devil's Lair, that the architects of these cement torture chambers deserve to traverse them in construction zones for eternity. It is not lost on either of them that their Bermuda Triangulation was precipitated by him screeching (yet again, she grinds her teeth) like an orangutan until she misses her exit. They are an hour late to meet friends, but thankfully they are forgiving friends. The mother reverts back to how she dealt with anger in her childhood: a seething, hissing figure, more radiator than person, glowering at her son as he happily skips with his friend and moves on.

He has not forgotten, though. He is tentative around her, certainly aware of their power imbalance. Finally back home, she has cooled off and he is seeking companionship from her after the deep freeze of their day together. He is missing his friend, his mother. She makes an overture: what should they make for dinner? "Something that I like to sneak on," he says, a hopeful sound in his voice. She knows that he likes to sneak on tofu and vegan cheese. After some negotiation and an only mildly awful trip to the grocery store, they settle on pasta with roasted vegetables and the breaded tofu nuggets that will broker the forgiveness deal between them.

He pours the marinade and swishes it over the tofu; he dips the cubes in the breading and gingerly places the coated pieces on a plate. She thanks him, perhaps too enthusiastically, but she is grateful for the opportunity. She sneaks glances at his little hands, still pudgy from toddlerhood but with fingers that are trying to be nimble and deft. He is proud of his work and trying and she loves him at moments like these more than she can ever express.

Breaded Tofu Nuggets of Forgiveness

1 pound firm tofu, drained and cubed

Marinade

1/2 cup apple cider vinegar
3/4 cup tamari
1/4 cup water
1 tablespoon sesame oil
1-inch piece of ginger, minced
2 cloves garlic, minced

Place the tofu in a 9X9 pan and pour the marinade over it. Let it marinate for at least twenty minutes. Remove cubes and keep the marinade for future use.

Crispy Coating

1 cup nutritional yeast (the big flakes, not the powder, for goodness sake)
1/3 cup breadcrumbs (gluten-free rice style worked well here)
1/4 cup panko (Japanese breadcrumbs found at natural foods store)
1/2 tablespoon garlic powder
2 teaspoons dried basil
1/4 teaspoon black pepper

Mix this together in a big bowl. Roll the tofu cubes around in this and place on a plate.

Heat two tablespoons of olive oil over medium heat in a large skillet. Cook the nuggets in this, taking care to not crowd them, for five minutes, turning them to brown all over. Do this as many times as you need to until all the tofu is done. You may need to re-oil the pan.

Enjoy and forgive.

Guilty pleasures...

I realize that my posts might come across like I'm some superior, self-righteous crank which I am totally not, but that runs the risk of sounding obnoxious as well, so with that in mind, plus the fact that I have no inspiration behind a post tonight, I offer you, dear reader, a sampling of my most guilty pleasures. Bear in mind that these are just the ones that I will reveal, so you can use your imagination for those that I am keeping to myself. (And, no, you sicko, that isn't one of them.)

1. I watch I Love Money. I watch nothing else on TV but I do watch what may be the absolute nadir of the VH1's Celebreality oeuvre, which is saying a lot, and it is every bit as car-wrecktacular, peeking through your fingers horrifying as you can imagine. Yet I watch, week after week. I have also lost precious IQ points - points that I just don't have to spare - because of it, too, yet I am addicted to these idiots. Every Sunday at 8:00, my Superego says to my Id, all sanctimoniously, "At the end of your life, are you going to wish you spent more time with your son or are you going to regret having missed I Love Money?" and every Sunday at 8:00, my Id shoulder checks my Superego and says, "Shut the eff up, you prig."

2. Along the same lines, I have People magazine and the National Enquirer within arm's reach. I did not buy these tabloids: my mother did and I am borrowing them. [I feel like I should apologize to Elizabeth Edwards, who is staring back at me so guilelessly from the cover of People: Elizabeth, it's not what it looks like. And, yes, honey, your husband's a major schmuck. Major. Can I buy you a margarita?] I have possession of these magazines for research purposes only. Strictly for research purposes.

3. Regarding this topic, do men have an equivalent of the "guilty pleasure" or is that strictly a female thing, invented to create yet more self-loathing among women? If a guy wants to do something, doesn't he just generally do it, no guilt or excuses necessary (figuring that it is within the bounds of law)? Anyway, more guilty pleasures: Ah-laska chocolate syrup; the Go-Go's CD I just bought (though it was used, which mitigates some of the guilt); filling my reusable mug with unpaid-for iced tea at various establishments that do NOT rhyme with Manera or Shipotle (and squeezing in a little lemon for good measure).

I honestly can't think of anything else. I'm such a priss.

Shalom, everyone.

These old friends...

I have been in a nostalgic mood lately, though I'm not sure why. According to an astrologer, that might be how things are aspected in my chart, though a traditional Chinese medicine practitioner might believe that an organ or two could be out of whack. A psychoanalyst might say that I have unresolved issues that are causing me to resist living in the present. I will let the astrologer, Chinese medicine practitioner and psychoanalyst hash it out among themselves until they come to some sort of consensus - this sort of demographic is terrifyingly close to an assembly that could happen in my actual life - but in the meantime, I will just follow this whim and see where it leads me.

In all probability, it is writing for this blah-ggg that is causing my self-reflection, which in turn causes me some duress because I despise solipsism and navel-gazing so I am especially sensitive of being a perpetrator myself. That all being said, I can't deny that something in me is turning to the past, to old friends and heartless bastards alike, but especially the friends. I think that I am seeking some nourishment from these old ties, some validation that we were at one time very important to one another. I think the previous post about family got me thinking again about my particular group of college friends and our platonic but very passionate connection to one another. (Are women ever able to recreate these fervent relationships after, say, the age of 23?). Over the years - my immediate post-collegiate career was during the antediluvian period prior to electronic messages - the group of us just drifted apart, separated mostly by just plain and simple physical distance. I think that if the magic of email were around when we moved apart, we would likely still be in one another's lives.

We found each other when we were juniors, brought together by a rare and bold synergy that was palpable to all of us, and it was electric when we were together. We were all feminists, all activists, all finding our way through the world, all seeking something, namely, family. We were urban and from small towns, affluent and impoverished, lesbian, bisexual and straight, but it was the first time in my life that cliché from the 1970s had a personal meaning: sisterhood is powerful. Indeed, it is. Sisterhood cut through any superficial differences. (It wasn't all perfect, though for a time it was idyllic: we fell victim to a major schism toward the end, based on some pretty uncool, selfish behavior. Still, for a time it was magical.)

I distinctly remember a caravan of us driving to Topeka in support of upholding Roe V. Wade, and, more vividly, a different caravan to Wichita, screaming in transgressive unison to Patti Smith's Horses album (until we were, appropriately, hoarse), on our way to protest the Miss America contest, where we wore tiaras and sashes painted with Miss Stake and Miss Ogyny and whatever else tickled our collective fancy. We raced back to our friend's father's house - a stern-faced lawyer who was not expecting us - to watch ourselves on the news, eat cake and crack up. We had topless sleepover parties because we thought it was funny, we cried over our childhoods, we cooked together and, more than anything, laughed our asses off. I have so many stories from this time in my life, but I'm thinking that it's wise to parse them out sparingly if I'm going to be blah-ggging. (Yes, I'm keeping that new spelling for now.)

Anyway, last night, I couldn't sleep - what else is new? - so I did some internet searches on three old friends of mine from this time, women who, for the most part, I haven't been in contact with in more than ten years. One is a professor of psychology with a feminist bent and a published author. Another is the executive director of the only freestanding birth center/natural pregnancy center in her state. The third is the executive director of a bi, lesbian, and transgendered abuse survivor organization.

I am so proud of these old friends of mine, women I have been out of touch with for years but will consider lifelong friends. I'd like to think that we all helped to shape one another during this crucial time in our individual lives, helping to form the people we would become and help to create a standard together of living with authenticity and gusto.

I love my friends, even the ones who are no longer in my life. Hopefully one day that will change.

Shalom, everyone.

Rantless...

I think that I've rendered myself rantless these days what with stepping as far to the side as far as I can to avoid popular culture's tentacles while not becoming Unibomber-esque. I'm not living in a barricaded and isolated mountain shack...yet. Still, most of what consumes me with righteous indignation and ignites my perpetual sense of moral outrage can be traced to the vapidity of this stupid world we live in, and this stupid world we live in, in this country at least, is completely tangled up with popular culture: idiotic television programs that inform taste and trends; bombastic and hypocritical punditry; the same ol' political theatrics, presented to us as some sort of duality when it is so clear that what keeps it alive is our buying into this alleged duality; the sadness I feel with the state of feminism and the unwillingness of environmentally- and socially-aware people to acknowledge the legitimacy of adopting a vegan lifestyle. All these things agitate me, like a washer out of its cycle, thrashing and shaking. What I used to do is throw myself into the ring, and, to use a violent metaphor, slug my way (verbally) at my opponents, fists perpetually balled up. These days, I don't know if I have become more peaceful or more passive, but the last thing I want to do is engage with those who are hellbent against progress.

The principle behind homeopathy is that like treats like. Perhaps, in life, like seeks like as well. We usually think of harmony as disparate elements in balance, the yin and the yang fitting together like a perfect squeeze, but maybe it is more subtle than that, more of a delicate fine-tuning to find your inner-harmony. When I think about my close friends, yes, we might have some basic differences, but they are not insurmountable: our core values mesh well. I am trying to live a meaningful, rich life and so those who I seek out and those who seek me out tend to be doing the same thing. Of course I don't attract anti-immigration Limbaugh-listening hunters into my life and I wouldn't even if I lived in that territory: we are not in resonance. You know that hoary old chestnut that if you dislike someone, it's because they remind you of some aspect of yourself that you don't like? Well, I do think that at times that's true, but sometimes you just don't like someone because he's an asshole whose values and behavior are totally foreign to you.

When I moved out of my childhood home and went to college, I discovered a broader but deeper meaning of family. The friends I made there became another family to me, a family of my choosing and discretion. Whereas family once meant to me something that I was locked into, an inevitability that I had little to do with, my family in college gave new meaning to the word, making it much more dynamic and personal. I didn't have to be constrained anymore by birthright, tied in with an alcoholic father because of our shared DNA: I could have sisters who were brilliant, creative, deeply compassionate because we were drawn together due to something almost as inevitable as DNA: our likenesses. Again, like seeks like.

I am always going to be an activist; I am always going to speak out. It's just that what I'm drawn to in my personal life is not argument and conflict. I'm too busy for that. Thus, I avoid the news, I avoid pop culture, and, in general, I try to trim the fat of life away as much as possible. I have found my life moving more and more in this direction over the years, leaner and more on target, less scattershot. What this means is that I have fewer things that I'm angry about, and, thus, fewer bloggable moments.

I hope that I can still make this work. I'm going to try.

Shalom, everyone.

Our children are our teachers...

Today, I was walking through Humboldt Park when my son bent down to sniff some Queen Anne's Lace flowers. "They smell like tortillas," he remarked matter-of-factly. "Sweet tortillas." I laughed but then was compelled to sniff them myself. He was absolutely right: sweet tortillas.

I blame it on a dweeb named Chilton...

I have had chronic insomnia since about the age of 20, the first year I had an apartment without a roommate. It was a basement (a.k.a. garden, although there was no garden to speak of, only some gravel - hey! - maybe in retrospect it was a rock garden but I was too small-minded to see that) apartment in a rickety old dark red wooden house near campus. I had three tiny rooms - a bedroom, kitchen and bathroom - and I am convinced that I could hear the inner-workings of every pipe in that house. Sinks, showers, toilets: any time any of those were in use, I received an at times screeching, at times rumbling announcement. It was as if my apartment were in somebody's very hungry (or displeased) stomach. Needless to say, I figured out how to spend most of my time in painting studio, coffee shops or bars.

I couldn't sleep in those places, though, and therein was the problem. There was another problem. His name was Chilton (Chilton!!) and he lived directly upstairs from me. He was a preppy, old money alcoholic from Kansas City and not long after he moved into the house, he started blasting - I mean blasting - his stereo at thirty second intervals starting at about two in the morning, and what made it worse was that he had awful taste in music. He'd be playing Styx, Foreigner. Anyway, that first night, after about a half hour of a bed rattling across the room and feeling like plaster was about to start falling from the ceiling, I went upstairs to confront him, which meant going outside in my robe because my apartment was along the side of the building. I pounded on his door for a good minute before he heard me. When he finally did, he opened his door with a wide smile, like, I don't know, he was expecting me to have brought him a 2:30 a.m. welcome-to-the-building cake or something, and I just said all staccato-like,"Turn. Off. Your. Horrible. Music. Now." He did, but being an entitled and privileged white boy, my angry demeanor tripped something in him that said, "Oh, she really doesn't like me. I must have her," and he commenced a month-long campaign to win me over that included flowers left at my door, notes slid under it, moon-y glances whenever I'd run into him while checking my mail. He was really, really annoying. Once it was clear that his overtures were not working - and that this wasn't just me being coy as I honestly, deeply disliked him - he began blasting his stupid stereo again and thus began my rocky relationship with sleep. I would call my landlord in the middle of the night and hold my phone out toward the ceiling and she would call him which would result in about twenty minutes of passive-aggressive stomping by him and broomstick counterpoints by me, and by the point that ended, I'd be so wide awake that I couldn't go back to sleep. So I'd read or draw or write until it started to get light and then I'd drift off again for a couple of hours and start with my day.

I think I realized during this time that there were these hours during the middle of the night that could be better utilized. Plus, sleeping involved dreaming, and I had (still have) some doozies thanks to my frequently scary home environment as a child, not to mention the fact that dreams were Freud's domain and, as a feminist, I was duty-bound to consider the person who championed of concept of "penis-envy" with derision. Thus, not sleeping could be interpreted as a feminist act of defiance. Take that, Freud! I would do without dreams and spend my REM hours catching up on assignments, building the case for a revolution through my creative output. It was like I had stumbled upon a secret - led there unintentionally by an annoying doofus - that there were all these extra hours of productivity no one else seemed to know about. (Of course, there were also many hours in the middle of the night when I was not sleeping when I was drinking and carousing with my friends: I wasn't always all that productive.)

These days, more often than not I am awake for at least a few hours in the middle of the night. Meditation, chamomile tea, self-hypnosis, caffeine- and sugar-avoidance do not really have much of an affect on whether I sleep or not. Except for a few short overlaps, one of us in the house seems to be always awake: John often stays up until midnight and I take over around 2:00 and stay up in 5:00 or so. Our son wakes up at 7:00. I guess you could call us vigilant. (Just last night I went downstairs to sit at the computer at 2:00 and I noticed that there was still cold water in the glass on the table next to me.) I don't know if it's because of a lust for life or a basic lack of discipline, but for me, the quote, "I'll sleep when I'm dead," feels very accurate.

Shalom, everyone.

In lieu of a summer vacation...

So it looks like fixing up the car, continuing to keep our home and the ability to purchase groceries is taking presidence over taking a summer vacation this year which I have to admit makes sense, even with my often-times impetuous attitude toward life. If we went away, it would surely be a nail-biter the whole time, and though I can be resourceful - I had to be when we ended up in San Francisco with far less money than we thought we had, and my son and I ended up getting by on approximately $7.00 a day for a week - I am really all right with the knowledge that if we do end up with time away from home, it'll probably be a weekend exploring the exotic wilds of Wisconsin. John and I are taking steps now to build more of a stable future, or at least a future with fewer threatening phone calls, and this feels right. As someone who has always jumped from whim to whim with the carefree nonchalance of a flowerchild, it feels a little scary to be so accepting of buckling down, but new behaviors are always challenging, right?

So it looks like Greece-Israel-Seattle-Vancouver-New Mexico will be another year. Given that, I think that a little walk down memory lane of all the horrible stuff that has happened to me while on vacation is in order.

* While downhill skiing somewhere in Massachusetts (I don't have any recollection where), I got my period and a forty-eight-hour hour flu at approximately the same time.

* An Amtrak to New York that was so delayed that my weekend in Manhattan ended up being about one full day.

* Standing in the extreme cold and rain of Washington, D.C., in November to protest George Bush's inauguration. While this was hardly a vacation - more like a spur-of-the-moment roadtrip with friends to scream at a processional of black-windowed limos presumably ushering Bush, Cheney and their cronies for about an hour - it was foreboding and appropriately chilling.

* Driving to Mount Rushmore with my family in the mid-1970s, with a father who was prone to road-raging and equally disinclined to pulling over for anything but the predetermined destination, no matter what the cause or how emphatically you pleaded it. We had the barf along the side of the car - thrown from a disposable cup at 70 mph - to prove it.

* The family wedding I went to with my parents in St. Louis, during the height of my feminist awakening in college. My father spotted my unshorn armpits at some juncture and he was apoplectic. He and I ended up having a screaming match in my room at the Marriott, a cathartic (for me) letting loose of nearly twenty years of mostly bottled-up rage at him, leaving me hoarse for days. While that was a distinctly unhappy trip, it was ultimately very therapeutic for me.

* Going to Chicago when my wallet was sitting in my desk drawer in Lawrence, Kansas.

* Driving down Route 66 in Oklahoma and Amarillo as a newly-minted vegan and trying to not develop a protein deficiency or scurvy.

* Listening to frantic message after message back at home in Chicago while we were visiting friends in Kansas, unable to piece together what had happened, only that it was something very bad and that I needed to call my mother as soon as possible. My father had suddenly died of a heart attack the day before New Year's Eve.

* The Evil Girl Squad who reigned supreme on our bus and tormented everyone who wasn't one of them on my seventh grade trip to Washington, DC. They stalked up and down the aisle, mean power gleaming in their eyes, looking for fresh victims while the rest of us, including the chaperones, slunk low in our seats, steadfastly avoided eye contact.

See? Traveling is not all it's cracked up to be. Vacations can mean sunburns or a disappointing amount of rain, forgetting your swimsuit, unfortunate reactions to the local drinking water, an unfavorable exchange rate, customs, a heightened likelihood that you will lose your wallet, locals giving you the evil eye for being less than fluent and arguments over who left the map back at the restaurant sixty miles away.

Oh, who am I kidding? As soon as I can responsibly divert a little cash from our car, house and debt, I am so out of here.

Shalom, everyone.