The Simone de Beauvoir Party

Last night Krista and I had our first official dinner party. Sure, we've had people over in the past - once for a game night and once for Krista's birthday (the time we nearly set the apartment on fire again - but this was our first proper sit-down meal with courses and stuff. I called it our Simone de Beauvoir party because we invited all the female students in our department and in the invitation I said we'd be discussing The Second Sex and braiding each others' hair, but neither of those actually happened.

I made cheese straws for people to nosh on before dinner, as those are what people always have at dinner parties in books. I made them the night before, and I actually found they were best right out of the oven, but they went over rather well. When our guests arrived (we had a total of six people, counting me and Krista) they insisted on sitting on the floor in a circle. It felt sort of like a coven meeting, especially with Susan decked out head to toe in black, with big witchcrafty boots. At one point we were discussing Quine, but the conversation about Quine got mixed up somehow with an aside about a former colleague of Kari's whom Sharon and I had met in Memphis and who apparently thought we were hot. Susan was confused by the overlapping threads of conversation and thought we were discussing who Quine thought was hot. The possibility of breaking out the Ouija board was discussed to settle Quine's opinion once and for all.

I also made my gingered carrot soup and rolls using this recipe, which were rather good even though I didn't exactly follow all the directions. Krista helped by setting the sponge yesterday morning, and when I got back from the grocery store it was all bubbly and sentient. Baking is so cool.

The main course was fettuccine with creamy red pepper sauce (Serious Eats again!) which was disappointing because the pasta stuck together, making it hard to eat. I put a little oil in the water to keep this from happening but it didn't work. Susan brought pumpkin bread pudding for dessert, which was delicious, and we went through two bottles of red wine.

I don't really know much about wine, so when I went to the store to get some for the party I went straight for the Excelsior Cabernet I used to get in Northampton, but they didn't have it. So I asked the fellow working there to recommend a cheap white and a cheap red, and the red he suggested was this:

which I obviously had to get, given the theme of our party. It was pretty good, as far as I could tell. (We now have an unopened bottle of white wine chilling in our fridge, and it will probably be there for quite awhile as Krista and I can't drink a whole bottle of wine all by ourselves. Maybe we'll break it out to celebrate the end of the semester.)

I consider our party a total success - everyone was jolly and seemed to enjoy the spread and be suitably impressed by the from-scratchness of it all, and it was very nice to just spend time with the female portion of the philosophy department - because if there's one thing I love (in all seriousness), it's voluntary gender segregation.

After everyone left, Krista and I did the dishes and then I went and passed out in my room. Having a party really takes it out of you.

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.

God's in his heaven, all's right with the world

Last night I saw They Might Be Giants at the Bluebird. The opening act was a band called Oppenheimer, who were actually quite good - I have seen many bands open for They Might Be Giants in my day, and I would say these guys were not quite up to the level of Ok Go, but certainly better than, oh, Corn Mo. (Click the link if you dare!) Oppenheimer is two guys from Belfast, one on drums and one on guitar, and they did a good, electronic power-pop-y set. They were super loud - my clothes were vibrating, my heart was beating in time. In certain moods, at certain times, I sure do love loud rock 'n' roll.

TMBG opened with a classic - "Hey Mr DJ, I Thought You Said We Had A Deal" - and afterwards, John Flansburgh remarked, "It may be a little early in the show to say this, but I think this may well be our BEST SHOW EVER." And it was pretty fantastic.

I have rarely seen John Linnell as animated or in such high spirits as last night. It was wonderful - he smiled the whole time, he told little anecdotes, he actually got out from behind the keyboard to move around on stage and DO THE ROBOT, he blew us a kiss at the end of the second encore. He did the robot, people. The man is like unto a god.

Linnell told a story of the first time they'd played in Bloomington, back in the 80's, when their manager's father attended the show and afterwards remarked, "That's how Hitler got started." This story seemed to really ring his bell.

John Flansburgh was also looking well, and I dig their current drummer - he's very animated. They played a good mix of old and new - a lot of stuff from The Else, as expected, but also classics like "I Palindrome I" and "Ana Ng." No real surprises, but no matter what, the opening bars of "New York City" will always be one of the most sublime moments life has to offer.