Umami for the Rocky Road

I can't believe I haven't put the two together before tonight: shredded, sweetened coconut folded into rocky road ice-cream makes for a scrumptious, texture-laden chocolate experience. Mmm. This definitely has umami. You know, umami, the fifth taste recently identified by food experts. Other foods with umami include soy sauce, ripe tomatoes and Parmesan cheese. From what I can gather, umami is a rich, salty, savory taste first discovered by a Japanese chemist; no English equivalent exists, which may say something about the limitations of the standard American palate. (Or the craziness of the Japanese, for which there exists ample evidence, mostly located in the video game arcades and oxygen bars of contemporary Tokyo.)

Unsubstantiated Asia barbs aside, I've been trying to convince T-money (his chosen moniker; apparently "T-man" is silly) to consider a honeymoon in Japan. I'd like to experience the sensory over-stimulation of urban Japan, and then spend a lot of time in the mountains. I imagine exquisitely detailed B&Bs in quiet, blossom-heavy gardens, with no company but the glassy-eyed coy and some diminutive old couple always pressing tea on us.

Note to the excessively PC: I understand the sociopolitical implications of imposing a Western-centric, bucolic vision on rural Japan, but luckily reality plays no role in my fantasy life. Reality would really put a damper on my imaginary affairs with the Naked Chef, as well as my flourishing careers as a harpist, Oscar-winner, Nobel Peace Prize recipient, and novelist.

Other honeymoon options are: the Caribbean; Hawaii; Big Sur; some little island in the South Pacific. The options are somewhat limited given our finances and schedules, but I like the South Pacific idea. Go somewhere with roast pig and pineapple for breakfast. Hard hot rains at 4pm; lots of crabs. (Of the edible variety, sicko.) I'm having a yen for adventure, and the honeymoon's going to be as close as we get to foreign travel for a while. I think T-money just wants to recline on the beach with a cocktail flag, so I might have to reign in the desire for far-off places and content myself with bikinis and mai tais. Yes, marriage is about compromise; though I think his desire for inactivity may stem from a particularly grueling Guatemalan volcano climb I initiated five years ago. Or that bike ride dodging chicken buses on Central American roads, to a lukewarm hot spring that gave us diarrhea. Or the 16-mile trek through the Gorge, which was so not my fault.

Oh, T-money, how you suffer the injustice of a hyperactive bride.

And that, sweet Anonymi, is where tonight's story ends. I'm sleepy and drained from student-teacher conferences and working for the man. Battlestar is calling my name, and so is bed, and evil kitty, and the moon.

Où est mon cerveau?

I am very tired, literally to the soles of my feet. I spent an hour grading two student essays tonight and feel it is impossible to go on. This is bad news bears. I have 11 more of the hot little items on my desk, and ostensibly 8 coming in late by Friday at noon (god damn the procrastinatory cretins! Next term, no late work!). I worry that I'm losing my intelligence. This frightens me because I'd actually like to teach full time, and I'm generally a popular writing teacher. Nice but critical. But this term I have just enough sleep deprivation and stress, coupled with several highly intelligent smart-ass students, that I find myself having trouble keeping up. And I'm the woman who was reading Baudrillard and deciphering Benjamin a year ago!

Why did I leave graduate school? My new life of servitude is turning my critical faculties to mush.

I do wonder where my life is going to go. By day, display-setting, label-stickering, cynical retail babe. By night, by turns, political actress, college professor, bride to be (yes, there are actually activities associated with this position), and happy homemaker. Who really needs to clean the cat litter. Sigh.

I guess I'm just having one of those hopeless nights, where I know there is no end in sight to the pile of work I have left to do and I worry that I'm doing it all poorly. I hope that somewhere down the line--in a cushy chair in my community college or prep school office, perhaps--I'll be able to reflect on this period of my life with humor and relief. In the meantime, I should shower, clean the litter, and get my ass to bed. Tomorrow's another long day, and two essays ain't gonna cut it.

Minutiae

Manic schedule, no time to blog. Just wanted to say that it's exciting to be receiving more comments, even if they are posted by "anonymous" (be a man and give yourself a more telling pseudonym!). I thought of a good idea for a short story today, about a pathetic but dangerous bookstore lackey who slowly begins to sabotage his place of employment, beginning with minor annoyances (removing the rubber tips from the door stoppers, say) and ending in some sort of uncomfortable, if not cataclysmic, violence.

No, the lackey isn't me. I have a male in mind, balding, soft, perpetually sweaty, with eczema on the crown of his head. The kind of guy you don't want to be too nice to, lest he get the wrong idea.

One day, when life is less hectic, I'll try to write it. In the mean time, back to grading essays!

Rachel Corrie

No doubt some of the humanitarian activists out there have heard of Rachel Corrie, a young woman who died blocking a Palestinian home from demolition when an IDF bulldozer ran over her. I have to admit that although I'd known about Rachel for a while--one of those newstories that register in the recesses of your brain for a bit, maybe that come to the fore when someone mentions a pertinent detail or story--I just didn't care that much. Sure, I cared that a brave young woman was callously killed by the Israeli army, and I cared about both the Israelis and the Palestinians caught in the crossfire between two enemy states, but to me Rachel was just another idealistic, pig-headed, uncritical liberal arts advocate of the Palestinian cause, one who gave no thought to the Israeli side of things. To which I do give some thought, perhaps because they're Jews like me, and I feel the tug and strain of an eons-long diaspora. Rachel--what I thought I knew of Rachel--reminded me of girls I knew at Reed who wore their PC vocabularies both like self-righteous armor and a hair shirt, flagellating themselves each time they said, "black" or "affirmative action is flawed" or "sometimes gay men are effeminate." I never liked those girls. For all their good-heartedness I hated their rules and stridency. I don't know that life, and its attendant problems, are best approached with a battle plan.

But I don't know. Despite my good intentions I think I probably fit into MLK's loathed "white moderate majority." So I give to the Darfur Coalition, and I give to Green Peace and the ACLU, and I read the NYT and Salon.com and listen to the BBC's The World. I try within the bubble of my comfortable home with my sheepskin slippers and free-trade organic coffee to do good, but I know it all amounts to very little. And this troubles me.

So this week I took the opportunity to play Rachel Corrie in the play, "My Name is Rachel Corrie." We've split the one-woman show into three parts: Girl, Warrior, Poet. It's beautiful. She writes--because it's all Rachel's writings--about awakening to the world's problems, and of watching cartoons with babies in a warzone, and of standing, alone, with a megaphone and a peace flag trying as one little person to make people see the illogic of racial and territorial violence.

Her words aren't about opposing Palestine and Israel; she doesn't want to be martyred for a cause; she doesn't wear her beliefs like armor or a hair shirt. She just wanted the world to be good. Oh how beautiful, very very beautiful, is that sentiment?