Shang huo

When I was in China (all my stories start that way), I remember once coming upon my friend Fang Ge spitting blood into the flowerbeds outside the teachers' dormitory. Alarmed, I asked him what had happened. He replied that he had eaten too much pork or bananas recently and was suffering from a touch of shang huo - an excess of internal heat. It has to do with the balance of ying and yang, I believe. I thought this was ridiculous, and my friend Xiaoxue (whose mother was a doctor) and I used to argue about it. Basically my argument boiled down to, "If there were such a thing as shang huo, we would know about it in the West." (There are, in fact, westerners who regulate their diet in terms of ying and yang, but these are people on macrobiotic diets, i.e. chumps.)

The other day, quite out of the blue and almost without precedent, I found myself craving Chinese food. I don't, on the whole, look back on most Chinese food with longing, but mostly because I got so sick of it, not because it was bad. I found myself thinking of my weekend breakfasts in Beijing: a hot glass of sweet soymilk, and a deep fried dough stick or a zongzi. On weekday mornings I would go to the dorm cafeteria for a bowl of noodles and a steamed bun filled with sweet yellow ... stuff. Anyway, today I found myself near the good international grocery store and I spent a good half hour just looking. I love this place; they've got everything from ghee to queso fresco and prawn flavored rice porridge. After much deliberation, I got some snow peas, dumpling shells (so I can make scrambled egg and tomato dumplings, my favorite), chicken and vegetable dumplings, steamed buns stuffed with red bean paste, and a mango.

I took it all home and sliced up the mango for my afternoon snack, and to my surprise I found I felt guilty about devouring it - there's not much better for you than mango, but I felt like I was eating cream cheese frosting with a spoon. I guess I must have internalized some of Xiaoxue's warnings. If I start breaking out or bleeding from the gums, I guess I'll owe China an apology.

Spring Break

My spring break is drawing to a close, and although I've been devoting a ridiculous amount of time to my Tarski and Sartre papers (and still it's not nearly enough), I've also managed to have some fun. Cufflinks and I took Wednesday off and went hiking in Yellowwood State Park, which was really lovely - it was a very nice day and we got a nice longish car ride through the Indiana countryside, listening to Interpol and folk. We had dinner at his place and then went to a pub for dessert, where we watched old people swing dancing to live music. Most enjoyable.

I have a very low-key weekend planned; Krista's in Chicago, so I have the apartment to myself. I'm planning to make pasta puttanesca for St Joseph's Day on Sunday - I bought anchovies and everything. Classes resume Monday and then we're in the home stretch!

Community Kitchen

Today was my first serving shift at the Community Kitchen (my past shifts have all been prep shifts). Serving is fun, and it was good to actually see the patrons, all of whom were quite polite and pleasant. A lot of them commented on my t-shirt, which says "Brooklyn Grows Great Women." I served ham and potato casserole, baked beans, salad, and pineapple.

My favorite thing about the community kitchen is the other volunteers - where else can you see heavily tattooed punks, retirees, Midwestern college kids and the cognitively disabled all working happily together towards a common goal? It's so nice!

Merely some incoherent ravings about food.

Meat! Oh, warm and savory animal tissue! Tonight I cooked meat for the first time all semester; I really shouldn't go shopping when I'm feeling out of it, because the other day I came home with a pound of reduced-price frozen turkey, ground up in a tube. I used it to make Asian Turkey Burgers, which were a very delicious vehicle for ketchup, that most delectable of sauces.

INGREDIENTS

• 1 egg white
• 2 tablespoon soy sauce
• 3/4 cup dry bread crumbs
• 1 tablespoon finely chopped onion
• 1 garlic clove, minced
• 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
• 1/4 teaspoon pepper
• 16 ounces ground turkey
  

In a bowl, combine the first seven ingredients. Crumble turkey over mixture and mix just until combined. Shape into four patties. Cook in a nonstick skillet coated with nonstick cooking spray until no longer pink.

Last week I bought some of those new pepper Triscuits and they were gone within 24 hours; K and I simply demolished them. This week they were out - pepper Triscuits are a craze sweeping the nation apparently - so I got fire roasted tomato instead, which were half-off but not quite the taste sensation of the pepper ones.

Another thing that's revolutionized my life in the kitchen lately is Jiffy cornbread mix. I always bake bread on Sundays, but we often run out, and when that happens I supplement our starch supply with biscuits - made from Kroger baking mix - or cornbread, made from scratch using the recipe in the More With Less Cookbook. Now, however, I have tried the Jiffy mix and I will never go back. It's just 37 cents a box, and all it takes is an egg and 1/3 of a cup of milk! You can have warm corn muffins for tea whenever you want! Revelation!

And oh, man, ORANGE JUICE! This is the first time we've had orange juice, all frozen and condensed - brought me back to my childhood. Good stuff! I've been getting a little crazy with the groceries lately - I bought all this name-brand stuff: Triscuits, Honeymaid Graham crackers (they're SO much better than the store-brand though), Minute Maid orange juice, Kraft cheese. I really need to cut back a bit - next week, no fancy stuff! Maybe name-brand raisins, but that's it!

On Friday I did a shift at the soup kitchen and they actually let me do stuff! I got to chop up a million eggplants (and then that night I went home and made eggplant parmesan, yum) and make salads! Eric, the guy in charge, pointed me in the direction of some bags of wilted lettuce and said he didn't like to stifle people's creativity, so just have at. There's a limit to what you can accomplish with wilted iceberg lettuce and carrot sticks, but I had fun. TWO shifts next week because I'm on Spring Break, and I'm totally looking forward to them.

Rabbits and Suffering

My department, as it turns out, has a specialty. We do religious philosophy. We're actually, as I understand it, a really good place for religious philosophy - if you're into that sort of thing you might also go to Notre Dame, but I think we're higher ranked. I have been trying since I got here to articulate exactly why I think religion and philosophy should be kept separate, and then today it hit me:

Philosophy is based on rigor. Religion is based on faith.

Don't get me wrong; if you want to do religious philosophy, I say have at. You can try to prove the existence of God or whatever and that's fine. You can even, if you insist, assume the existence of God and work from there. But it isn't good religion and it certainly isn't good philosophy.

Case in point: some people have argued against modal realism by pointing out that, if there are possible worlds that realize every possibility, then there must be a possible world consisting of nothing but rabbits and suffering. In fact, there must be infinitely many. (Don't worry about why this follows; it actually does.) Now, God would never have created infinitely many worlds consisting of just rabbits and suffering, because that's arbitrary and God is never arbitrary. Therefore modal realism cannot be true. QED.

Let's think about what's wrong with this argument: the arguer assumes

1. That there is a God
   
2. That she [the arguer] knows what God would and wouldn't do
3. That God never does anything arbitrary
4. That it even makes sense to talk about arbitrariness on this scale.
   

All of these assumptions are problematic. Passing lightly over 1, how on earth do you come by the knowledge of what God would or wouldn't do? Most likely you have read it in your notoriously over-translated and difficult to understand Book. Okay, let's assume that's legit - let's assume that the book is totally true, that your interpretation is flawless, and that either it somewhere covers this case specifically (the Bible says a lot of things, after all) or it's possible to correctly extrapolate from what it does say. I'll grant you all that. But then tell me this: what the heck is the point of philosophy? If all the answers are in your book, what are we doing? Does philosophy boil down to Biblical exegesis? Is it too late for me to apply to library school?

So 2 is problematic; what about 3? One word: Job. Moving on.

Finally, how does it make any sense at all to talk about arbitrariness on that scale? How is it any more arbitrary to create infinitely many worlds than it is to create just one? Just one? Why would God do that? See #2. But our human notion of arbitrariness can't be applied to God's actions in creating worlds. If God created as many worlds as there were people alive on Earth at 11:59 a.m. on December 14, 1974, that would be entirely God's prerogative. Does that seem random to me? Sure! But hey, God moves in mysterious ways. It's not for me to understand.

Philosophy, though - that is something I must try to understand. And that's the difference.