Anyone who has cooked with fresh garlic knows that removing the skin can prove difficult. A common method for easing the task is to microwave the clove for five seconds. However, microwaving food alters its molecular structure and this, its flavor. A better way follows:
1. Firmly grasp the clove between the thumbs and index fingers.
2. Gently twist, back and forth, until you hear a snap.
3. Grasp the tip of the skin and remove it.
1. Melt I can’t believe it’s not butter in saute pan, over medium heat. Add polenta and cover.
2. Prepare poached eggs.
3. Heat hummus in the microwave, for 20 seconds.
4. Stack the eggs on top of the polenta and spoon the warmed hummus over the top.
**TIP: If you don’t like a lot of hummus, decrease the amount to one serving.
* Percent Daily Values are based on a 2,000 calorie diet. Your daily values may be higher or lower depending on your calories needs.
Read more: http://www.livestrong.com/recipes/laydbibos-ovo-vegetarian-faux-eggs-benedict/#ixzz2O1Qk8Ezi
We are raised to observe at least the most basic etiquette of saying, please and thank you. This is true even across widely different cultures. I am no exception. Yet, as I grow older, I become more acceptingof the things I must do and understand that anything else is my choice, I begin to find this a tiresome practice. It is nothing more than placatory to congratulate one another on fulfilling obligations and to expect it for that which we choose, of our own free will, to do is simply obnoxious.
In my opinion, it invariably fosters the very same resentment, which we are attempting to avoid because then we develop expectations for what constitutes appropriate gratitude. “Thank you” is almost never enough; if the right tone, excitement, and sincerity do not meet expectations. The root of the problem is acceptance. We must meet obligations; regardless of whether anyone ever appreciates it. Expecting appreciation is childish.
We also do many things beyond the necessary actions of our lives and all of those things are choices. We do not have to do anything beyond our
obligations and what is necessary to survive. So why do we expect gratitude? If we perform only the extra actions of our choosing then why should others thank us for it? This is particularly true when we volunteer, but even if we do not; it is always our option to say no.
I believe that raising our children to accept responsibility without expectation of appreciation and beyond that, give what they choose without expectation of recognition or reciprocation. Doing so would serve to alleviate the resentment that manners and etiquette only seem to aggravate. I do not expect a thank you for anything I do. If I am responsible for it, then it is not a favor and should not require recognition; if it is a favor, then it is my choice and does not require gratitude.
If I do something nice for you and you would like to show your appreciation, consider returning the favor. Do not thank me or I will be unlikely ever to do anything else nice for you.
Our world is a vast wonderland of sights and experiences, but the majority of men will live, and die in it, while experiencing but a modicum of what it has to offer. Most spend their lives either struggling from day to day, or preparing for the future and old age in particular, but few truly venture outside of what they are taught, and believe is the only way to live. Unfortunately for most, this is limited to working and striving for financial and material security they never achieve, leaving little opportunity for pleasure, simply because it is considered to be the correct mode of living. As a result, the majority of men do “lead lives of quiet desperation” (Thoreau, 8) because excessive labor divests them of the ability to enjoy life, while leaving them not only still financially, but also socially, spiritually, and emotionally impoverished.
They were taught since the earliest of times that one must have certain things in order to be fulfilled and happy. The most important of these is to own a home and/or parcel of land. They learn that, without land ownership and roots, they have and are nothing, but Thoreau explains these “men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost” (Thoreau, 4). Men waste their youth, the time when their energy is high and their wonder great and new, for something that is ultimately unnecessary. There are many men that are “portionless” (Thoreau, 4) who are nevertheless alive and potentially better off than landowners. According to Thoreau “the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day, he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men, his labors would be depreciated in the market” (Thoreau, 5-6) because we scarcely have the time and energy to manage the square footage of ourselves, much less a huge tract of earth.
So much of their time and energies must be devoted solely to laboring and earning a living that they are not even able to afford to take time for peer companionship because if they did, the fruits of their labor would be lost or undermined by even the slightest amount of time taken for such leisure. A home and land are things that require constant attention or can easily fall into disrepair. The lack of human interaction deprives them of much of the joy and richness of life because, by nature, man is a social and pleasure driven animal. It is for this reason that Thoreau states “most men . . . are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them” (Thoreau, 5). The best and most important things in life are free, but only if those living are free from unnecessary encumbrance, in order to experience them. These include companionship and love, nature, art, literature, and all other manner of wonder in the world. These are lost in time a man spends over invalid concern for material wealth and the grueling work that is required for, but seldom, achieves it and “he has not time to be anything but a machine” (Thoreau, 6). What he means is that all of one’s life is ultimately consumed in the pursuit of land and wealth that rob him of a happy and fulfilling life.
Indeed, not only are most men’s lives consumed in this futile and extraneous material pursuit, but even the time required for the simple pleasure of sitting down to read a book must be pilfered from one’s duties and responsibilities. Thoreau exposes this rather bluntly, when he says he has “no doubt that some of you who read this book are unable to pay for all of the meals that you have actually eaten, or for the coats and shoes which are fast wearing or are already worn out, and have come to this page to spend borrowed or stolen time, robbing your creditors of an hour” (Thoreau, 6). In other words, he sees that the majority of men work most every waking moment of their lives, only to drown in debt for such basics as food, clothing and shelter. They waste their youth and health, doing nothing more than earning money to pay the debts of yesterday, with ever increasing amounts owed. The only possible result of this can be desperation, because in order to override the needs of the mind, heart, and soul, in the service of material gain, one must resign oneself to not living at all. Thoreau denounces this “resignation [as] confirmed desperation” (Thoreau, 8) and goes on to say “it is characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things” (Thoreau, 8). He means that although most men are aware that their mode of living does not bring fulfillment, they have accepted it as their only option because convention says they ought, and having done so creates an inner longing so great, that it morphs into despondency, and that is simply foolish.
In reality, men need very little to survive and yet, they devote their lives to little or nothing more than survival. Yet deep within themselves, they are painfully aware that their lives are devoid of that which is truly important to a good and happy life. So they will spend it locked in silent inner turmoil, always struggling with the edict to strive for the wealth they will never attain, in only the smallest and most insignificant of ways, but always losing the fight and ultimately dying without ever having lived.
Works cited
Thoreau, Henry David. <em>Walden</em>(1854). Dover Publications (April 12, 1995)
| Prep Time: 5 min | Serves: 40 |
| Cooking Time: 30 min | Yield: 40 squares |
| Calories: 122 | Calories from fat: 53.6 |
Ingredients
(MMJ Tip: substitute the butter for budder and this is a fantastic pain and insomnia reliever, as well as a remedy for poor appetite)
It’s only gonna be about a matter of time
Before you get loose and start lose your mind
Cop you a drink, go head and rock your ice
Cause we celebrating No More Drama in our life ~ Mary J. Blige, Family Affair
SMILE, FUCKER, WE ARE CELEBRATING!!!
Listen to the fuckin’ song, it speaks for itself.
And without further ado, Mary J. Blige, you are hereby inducted to the Hall of Awesome for extreme repeat-one-ibility.
Tea, often perceived as comforting or healing, is a symbol for nurturing and tenderness.
We were alone together, in my room and you stood so close, that I could feel the heat of your body and breath. I shivered as your hand grazed my shoulder and closed my eyes as you bent to kiss my lips. Just then, the door to the room burst open and in barged a dozen children, girls, aged six to fourteen. They were all talking at once, urgently, their high-pitched voices and words blending together, in a cacophony. I was annoyed as they tried to come between us and I forced them from the room. As we began again, they barged in again and this time, more insistently, they latched onto my arms, legs and waist, to drag me away from you. As I looked from their pleading eyes to yours amused, I remembered cruelty, betrayal and violence. I knew these were your victims. Each could have been me. I allowed them to pull me away and I did not look back, as they closed the door behind us, on you.
As I go through counseling to work through the trauma of being raped continuously throughout my childhood, I am beginning to see disturbing patterns in societal attitudes toward rape and violence against women in general. These serve to minimize the perceived severity of the effect that rape and domestic abuse have on a woman. The overwhelming and yet veiled response I have received from the majority of people with whom I have shared any part of my story seems to say,
Too bad it happened that way but that is supposed to happen to you anyway, so shut up and get over it.
Once, I even read a statement from a middle-aged man reminiscing fondly about a time when rape was kept quiet and women just,
Got over it or died or something.
Many people seem to believe that rape is a man simply ignoring a woman’s refusal to his advances; that any woman who is raped has chosen to be because all she has to do is disregard her own desires for her body and just submit to it. A perfect example of this is the following statement, tweeted by an account claiming to be a female,
Don’t want to be raped? Just don’t say no.
Once, after a fairly recent rape when I was venting on twitter, a man I followed until that day was tweeting about how he was complaining to his wife about rape victims and that when she asked what he had against them, he told her,
My dick.
The three previously mentioned statements are far from isolated. At least once every day, I see rape used as joke fodder and made light of by both men and women, no matter how many people I block on social networks or sites avoided or shows/comedians boycotted. I see lonely women joking about turning off their rape alarms or silently praying to themselves that someone will drug their drinks whilst they are in a bar restroom. I see men joking that their wives say the best sex they ever had was when he pretended to break in wearing a ski mask and he has no idea what she is talking about. There is one joke, which has been starred on favstar.fm by a sickening number of people, that reads,
I can tell within the first 20 seconds of meeting you whether our sex will be consensual or not.
This callous dismissal of the trauma of rape is never ending.
The reality is that rape is terrifying and excruciatingly painful. It is not a sexual act and not saying no is not an option because rapists don’t ask. Rapists do not rape because they want to have sex with women who refuse their advances. They do it to control the woman because they feel powerless, inadequate and ineffectual themselves. A rapist does not want a woman to consent. I know this all too well because after reading a rape scene from Robert A. Heinlein’s book, “Friday”, where the heroine successfully stymies her rapists by behaving as though she is voraciously enjoying it, I attempted the same the next time my abuser raped me. He flew into a rage and began slapping me and beating me with his fists in the chest, upper and lower abdomen and groin. He knew that he could hit me hard enough in those areas to cause excruciating pain with minimal bruising. Then he picked me up and threw me onto my stomach, after which he proceeded to sodomize me harder than a railroad worker hits a railroad tie with a sledgehammer. He raped my anus so forcefully that I am certain that it had to be painful, to some degree, even to him. He certainly could not have found it pleasurable. I did not hear and thus do not remember most of the things he shouted while doing it because he had shoved my face into a pillow to stifle my screams and so it partially obscured my hearing as well but the overwhelming theme was that I was a whore and so I had to be punished.
I was fifteen years old. The memory of it is so vivid that I can feel phantom pain in my anus as I type this article. This horror is but one of at least hundreds and perhaps even thousands that I suffered between the ages of two and seventeen.
How people, any of them, can see anything but horror in that; how they can make light and laugh at it or as in one statement, be turned on by it, is truly beyond me. I do not know what makes a person so inhuman as to belittle and minimize the trauma of rape in an attempt to shame and silence rape victims and I do not care to know. All I know is that it is those people and not even the sick men who have raped me that have destroyed my love for and faith in humanity. It is because of them that I no longer desire to become a research scientist who cures diseases and saves lives. It is because of those people that I dream of finding some way to exterminate every last human because I feel that we are too horrible to live. So when I am told that my anger is misdirected and that I am lashing out at the wrong people, who don’t deserve it, I vehemently disagree.
The men who have raped me are disturbed beyond the capability of love or happiness. All of them are so miserable that in their middle age they seem decades older because their crimes have marked them. They look as though death is chasing them already, even in the case of one who was extremely physically fit for most of his life, as an avid athlete. He has been such a severe alcoholic for at least the last twenty years that in his late forties, his liver, pancreas and neck glands are already visibly enlarged. He has already begun to die. There is no angle from which this situation is not tragic.
While I hold these men and no one else responsible for their crimes against me, I have enough knowledge of the psychology of a rapist to also know that they take no joy in their crimes, despite the ways they will taunt victims after the act, if given the chance. Their crimes are pathologically driven and I do not hold them against humankind as a whole.
Those who belittle and minimize it with jokes and sarcasm are not pathologically driven. It is simply a cruel manifestation of ostrich syndrome (which is inappropriately named, as ostriches are actually quite aggressive when confronted and sometimes just in general). They don’t want to see the horrors of the world and so they make a joke out of it but until you have had your anus ripped apart and bruised for the crime of being a teenage girl, you don’t get to joke about it! Do you know why? It is because if you were, you would never joke about it!
I have come to believe that many of them are only so callous because they are ignorant of the realities of rape. This is largely due to the shaming of women into never speaking of their experiences or if they do it must be vague and cryptic. So I am starting a new category, which will touch on the gruesome realities of my experiences because I have had enough. If you refuse to look, I will shove your nose in it as hard and as often as possible, until you get it through your head that rape is not something to be trivialized.
Egg white omelet with garlic, thyme, neufchatel cheese and mango-pineapple salsa.
Preparation time: 5 minutes
Cook time: 10 minutes
Servings: 2
Ingredients:
Directions:
Nutrition information (per livestrong.com):
Amount per Serving
Calories 179 Calories from Fat 106.4
Total Fat 11.82g
Saturated Fat 4.32g
Cholesterol 15mg
Sodium 289.79mg
Total Carbohydrate 4.67g
Dietary Fiber 0.07g
Sugars 2.96g
Protein 13.7g
