Magic Spot Flowing

June is apparently National Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Month. It’s also National Candy Month. Mixed messages, anyone?

And…National Crab-Stuffed Flounder Day? Are you kidding me?

I’ve had kind of a crazy week — maybe kind of a crazy month, really — and two things this week were particularly fantastic:

Dry-farmed Early Girl tomatoes from Ella Bella Farm

These tomatoes are expensive compared to most of the heirlooms and organic tomatoes at the Menlo Park Farmer’s Market — they cost I think $3 or $3.50 a pound. But they are SO WORTH IT. OMG. They are fantastic and amazing and so flavorful and with great structure and they are great alone or in tomato-basil-mozzarella sandwiches and they pep up anything they are in, making a salad into a fun hunt-the-tomatoes experience.

XKCD Store’s customer service

A while back I ordered the Regular Expressions shirt from the XKCD store and I got it when I got back from Portland, but I hadn’t worn it until this week (everyone at work loves it, incidentally). When I did I found a small hole in the shirt. I wrote to the XKCD store person saying, hey, I found this hole, I don’t think I made it but I can’t be sure, and they said, basically, “No worries! We’ll send you a new shirt right away! Feel free to keep the old one!” How awesome is that? Love.

Wall-E should probably make this list too, because it is really sweet and funny and I liked it a lot, but foodie geek that I am, the other two things actually make me happier. Tomatoes and XKCD FTW.

Back in February after my first experience at the San Francisco Symphony, I wrote that if them doing the German Requiem (with SFSO Chorus) didn’t blow my mind, nothing would.

Well, it did. What a beautiful concert. For the first half they did Gestliches Lied and Four Songs for Women’s Chorus, which I thought were amazing. At intermission I described the sound to Ryan as like glass globes floating in the air. I don’t know how they (or Brahms) do it, but that’s what it sounds like. Brahms is odd because the songs are often sad but they don’t always sound it.

The Requiem was just wonderful. That piece lives in my soul, so I think it’s impossible for me to do an adequate description of it. It’s got so many tender and lovely moments, so many powerful moments, and so many sad moments, and the ensembles expressed it all perfectly, both emotionally and artistically. I savored my favorite moments, occasionally unable to resist silently forming the words in my own mouth and remembering how it felt to sing them. And I rediscovered other beautiful bits that I often pass over as I listen preferentially to my favorite movements.

Actually, the only weak spot for me (and this is perhaps more my taste than my artistic judgment) was the soloists. I felt the soprano was fine but too ’soprano’-ish and not very expressive, and the baritone was too quiet and his voice quality was blurry. But the choir and orchestra were absolutely on.

My mind is officially blown.

Tod, wo ist dein Stachel? Hölle, wo ist dein Sieg?

…I think I’ve fallen for California, or at least for the Bay Area.

I fell for San Francisco a bit before I moved here, loving the little houses all packed up in the hills. It reminded me a little of Edinburgh (the city I love best). I also had an affection for BART — the speed, the frequency, the sounds it makes when it accelerates.

But moving to the Peninsula isn’t really like moving to San Francisco. It’s suburbia on crack, high-density, long-range suburbia, set into a landscape that would be much more beautiful if only it weren’t crowded with overpriced, undermaintained homes. It’s a frustrating place to live — I think whether you have a car or not (because if you do, you spend a lot of time in traffic), but more so if you don’t. Not dense enough for transit to be effective, too dense for transit not to make sense. I was angry with Caltrain for being crappy. I didn’t feel at home. I couldn’t get to places. I didn’t know people.

But I got seduced by the flowers in everyone’s yards, the beautiful weather, and the ever-tantalizing closeness of both city and wilderness. You can go to San Francisco and have your fill of urbanness (I don’t need that much, it turns out). And there’s that little strip of undeveloped area off to the coast edge as you start to come south from the city, progressing to a wide swath of ranches, estates, parks and near-wilderness as you go further south. Hiking and riding in that area isn’t too far from being a little strip of heaven.

Farmer’s markets overflow with produce from farms in the nearby area and the Central Valley. There are towns and cities with a multitude of different sizes and personalities, and interesting places to go that aren’t really that far away, even though they’re a lot further away than most people want to admit. Slowly, I started to get the measure of this place. I didn’t realize how at home I’d become until a fortuitous invitation to temporarily get away came my way, and I realized I didn’t want to miss anything.

I have the uniform, but I never really thought I’d become a California girl. I guess I underestimated California.

The single paragraph in Garbage Land: On the Trail of Trash that most annoyed me was this one:

According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, which made exhaustive studies of consumers’ environmental impacts, the things that make the biggest differenc to planetary health are transportation, housing, and meat eating. It isn’t worth it, they said, to get worked up over paper versus plastic at the grocery store.

Okay, if your choice is actually only between paper or plastic, whatever — although I have my doubts about the equivalency given the persistence of plastic in the environment. But the thing is, there’s a third, very obvious choice: reusable bags.

It’s true that most of the choices we make have a relatively small effect on our environmental impact, but even in the small choices, sometimes there’s an option that’s clearly much better than the rest. Paper or plastic? Yes, who cares — not because they’re the same, but because you should ditch both and get some reusable bags.

The more interesting thing that I started to think about as I got further through the book is the idea of local waste disposal, especially as a parallel to local eating. One of the common threads of all the waste that the author tracks is that much of it goes a long way away from where it was first deemed to be waste — very much like many things we acquire are first shipped a long way to get to us. Even as far as the other side of the world, in both cases, some of the time.

The author talks to a few people who are devoutly into reducing waste (and others interested in it for financial gain), and one of the common threads, though it’s not mentioned explicitly is that the stuff doesn’t go as far away. Instead of being trucked to a landfill or going to a sewage plant, it goes into compost toilets or to a nearby Freecycler (Freecycle is mentioned briefly, along with craigslist). If we couldn’t push our waste so far away, we’d be more likely to notice that it’s excessive and noxious. Keeping everything local makes you care where it comes from and where it goes to. Local waste may be as important to the environmental picture as local eating.

Overall it’s an interesting book, although it’s a little inconsistent on information value since in many cases the author was denied access to the places that did her waste processing.

Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing.
–Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

This beautiful expression reminded me of a conversation I had with my dad a while back about spending and saving money. We both enjoy watching money accumulate, and tend not to buy things, even though we can afford them. We were talking about what luxury means, and how it can be easy to become jaded by what once seemed a luxury, unless you make a conscious effort to avoid that.

When I was a kid, my stocking always had an orange in the toe, and although I understood it was tradition, I never really knew why. I just figured that it was supposed to balance out the candy.

The quotation comes after a description of Kingsolver’s daughter Lily eating one of the tangerines they bought for the winter holidays after an eight-month hiatus on citrus, which isn’t grown in their local area and wasn’t in the high season anywhere nearby until then. Eating locally, citrus returned to being the luxury it was in the time when it became a tradition to have it in the Christmas stocking. It once would have been as treasured as the candy, maybe more so. But with the trend in shipping everything everywhere, it became an everyday thing. I don’t think I knew where oranges came from until after I was an adult, much less that they have a season.

Since I’ve been buying most of my produce at the farmer’s market, I’ve been incidentally eliminating a number of things that aren’t in season now, or aren’t grown at all near here — like bananas, also once a daily or weekly part of my diet, also once fruits that I didn’t recognize as denizens of a faraway place, possessed of their own season.

Bananas that cost a rainforest, refrigerator-trucked soymilk, and prewashed spinach shipped two thousand miles in plastic containers do not seem cruelty-free, in this context. A hundred different paths may lighten the world’s load of suffering. Giving up meat is one path, giving up bananas is another. The more we know about our food system, the more we are called into complex choices. –AVM p. 225

There’s something worthwhile about making sure that our ideas of everyday and luxury items, or everyday and luxury behaviors, don’t get too out of whack. The more we see as everyday, the less we have to get excited about on special occasions, the less excited we can get, and the more boring life seems. Or we keep seeking out greater and greater thrills, until our consumption and behavior become extreme. I’m happy to put limits on my everyday choices, both food and otherwise, if it means I gain more pleasure on the occasions that I allow myself to step outside those limits. And if it means the world will still have some resources available for all of us down the line.

This is a difficult line of reasoning, though, because where do we draw the line? Every day of my life is profligate luxury compared to some, yet very moderate compared to others. I don’t eat only beans and rice and live in a hut without running water; I don’t live in a multi-bedroom house, drive a Hummer, and wear diamonds.

What are we called on to do? This question is not academic in these early days of serious thinking about climate change and fossil fuel limits. McKibben raises the same question in Deep Economy: what are we all called on to do? We obviously have to give a great deal up, because right now our country of 5% of the world’s population is using 25% of its resources, but those in other countries want some of the benefits we’ve gotten from our cheap-fuel economy. Where in the middle do we meet? For now, I’m going to I hope it’s someplace where all of us choose some moderation, and we all also enjoy a few luxuries. And I’m going to keep looking for the place on the the scale where I feel like I’m doing the right thing by myself and the world.

…I don’t twitter. But apparently several of you do. I’m curious why. It doesn’t really resonate with me — too much announcement, too little interaction, maybe? It seems like Facebook status on crack, with what is entered becoming a kind of social performance piece to up the entertainment value. It reminds me of the way AIM messages were used in college when everyone was logged on all the time, often either vaguely mysterious or highly uninformative. I got uncomfortable with that during my extended AIM hiatus in Scotland, and now the idea of updating people on my status even as often as I do on Facebook (which isn’t very) seems odd to me.

Thoughts?

Back at the beginning of this blog’s existence I wrote some about Barry Schwarz’s book The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less. Recently I’ve thought that maybe he should have written a bit more about when more is less. He does devote some space to the subject of how meaningless some of our choices turn out to be, how they are not really different from each other. In those sorts of cases he advises that you spend as much time as the thing’s importance merits (usually not much), pick something, and stick to it. But sometimes you can’t because there are no options that are remotely like what you want. This really came home to me in two cases recently.

In one case, I was at a grocery store near work, looking for pita crisps to eat with lentil dip. This store has about a third of one side of an aisle devoted to crackers, but the vast majority of these crackers, probably 2/3 of the total, are either Wheat Thins or Triscuits. There are also smaller satellite brands like Cheez-Its and Ritz and a small section of more gourmet brands like Kashi, Stoned Wheat Thins (not at all like normal Wheat Thins; also, not drugged), Carr’s water crackers, and other oddities. However, none of the oddities includes pita or bagel crisps. There really is very little variety in the offerings unless what you want in variety is endless types of Wheat Thins and Triscuits. Low Sodium, Low Fat, Herb, Parmesan…any flavor and variant you want, but they’re all hard, square, plain or flavored small crackers. Where is the actual variety, the different kinds of crackers? Confined to a tiny portion of the section, and not even including anything other than standard crackers. I wandered through the store looking to see if they had hidden them somewhere else. No luck.

In the second case we were at Target looking for straps that go on the back of your sunglasses and keep them from falling off. Despite offering three racks of sunglasses and a rack of reading glasses, Target does not stock these things. At all. Not in jewelry & accessories, not in pharmacy, and not in sports. I went all over the store looking for this very simple thing which would take up hardly a foot counter space next to the sunglasses if they would just freaking buy some and put them there. There are three racks of sunglasses that all look basically identical and block 99-100% of UV light. Do we need three racks of sunglasses, or could we maybe add one rack of glasses straps? Why not? Target has practically everything except fresh food and extremely large specialty items. Glasses straps do not fall into either category; they should stock them and offer customers one more actual choice, instead of three dozen more identical sunglasses.

As it turns out, if you want glasses straps for kayaking, you should go to the kayak place and buy them there. And I guess if I want pita crisps I have to go to the giant new Safeway, or buy pita at TJs and make my own! It’s not that there aren’t options, but there sure is poor offering of true options at many large stores.

There’s been some kerfuffle around lately after an NYT article on “literary deal-breakers” — that is, what books, or lack of, would make you run away from a date or relationship? Two of the websites I read have a thread devoted to this. Some of the conversation has inspired interesting thoughts about people’s attitude to books and their interest in reading and how that affects compatibility for people who are readers, but a lot of the discussion seems dismissive and shallow to me. You dared to read Dan Brown or Ayn Rand? AWAY WITH YOU!

Here’s what bugs me about this: it means prejudging what the person thinks about the books that are on their shelves.

People have books on their bookshelves for many reasons. Slacktivist is reading Left Behind to do theological analysis on them. I own several books I probably would not have bought that were given to me as gifts and I feel reluctant to get rid of for that reason. Other people buy popular books to see what the hype is all about, and may not have even read them yet. If someone has a lot of self-help books, maybe they’re interested in them for critique, or comparison or systems, or they liked one or two of them but not the rest, or they found a little bit of each interesting but don’t have any fundamental problems that needed to be solved by any of them. One person might like Alexander McCall Smith because he writes about Scotland (or Africa), and another because he writes mysteries. I’ve read several of Larry Lessig’s books and I’m interested in the issues of digital intellectual property, but if I owned the books (I don’t, because I can’t casually buy every hardcover I want to read) it still wouldn’t mean I was a Larry Lessig groupie or agreed with him on everything. At one point in my life I owned a Michael Moore book. I kept it around for a while because he made some good points, but I still think Moore is off-base on a lot of his wilder rhetoric.

For me, it’s a lot more about what people think about the books they have, and if I saw someone with a Left Behind or Ann Coulter book, the first thing I would do personally wouldn’t be to run — it would be to ask whether they’d read them and why, what they thought of them, and all that.

I own a shelf of fantasy books (and more in boxes in my dad’s garage), some of which make up the whole of a series that I used to really, really love but which could legitimately be considered candy-ish and a little trite. But the thing is, I know they’re not high literature. They do, however, have a lot of good world-building, intriguing ideas about morality and government, and interesting characterization. And I’m not one of those people who goes on and on about a fantasy world in real life anymore, even if I was when I was 14. :) They’re not a big part of my life; the fact that I own the entire series is due to my habit of accumulating books and my old fondness for them. I own all the Harry Potter books in hardcover and the first one in three languages, but I’m a lot less interested in the Harry Potter world than some people who own them, and more so than others. I still read a fair bit of fantasy because many fictional worlds are interesting in themselves, and also because I don’t know many better ways of illuminating the way our reality shapes our beliefs and lifestyles than to read a book set in another reality.

If a guy ran away on seeing my book collection without asking me why I own the books I do, I can tell you we wouldn’t be well-matched, but it would not be because he doesn’t like fantasy, but because he’s hastily judgmental in a way that I dislike. Much as I dislike reading some of the content of these discussions, which often sound a lot like literary pissing contests. Oh — your dealbreaker is Dan Brown? Well mine is Jane Austen. He thinks men who read self-help books are wimps. She can’t believe anyone wouldn’t read fiction.

It’s not really about the books, it’s about why you own the books, why you read the books, and at that point it’s more about what you think anyway. Literary dealbreakers aren’t literary, they’re philosophical. And you can’t assume philosophy from simple ownership.

I was looking at a Netflix flier on M’s floor this morning and remarked “Funny they say that the plans start at 4.99 per month when the 4.99 plan really isn’t all that useful.” Then I thought, well, the 4.99 plan is 1 movie at a time, 2 per month. How often do I really exceed that? Right now I can have two out at a time, but I barely watch one per month on average. I do like having the choice of two movies, but practically speaking I don’t need the plan I have. Except that if I were sick or something, I’d want to be able to watch a lot of movies quickly. But Netflix allows you to change your plan pretty much whenever you want, I think (maybe not more often than once a month, but still). You can get an extra movie for a pro-rated amount of the next-higher plan for the remainder of the month, if you decide you need one.

As I was thinking about this, I made a connection to the complaint made in Who Killed the Electric Car? that the car has limited range (and the EV1, specifically, also had limited space). I tend to be confused people’s attachment to having a car that goes hundreds of miles and stores four people and a bunch of cargo when 90% of the time they go under 30 miles and carry one person and a tiny amount of cargo (a job that could easily be done by a bike, SmartCar, or other small vehicle). But here I am, making the analogous decision with my Netflix account.

I told this to M and he remarked that it’s a principle of system design: do you design for peak load, or average load? And there’s a definite desire to design and select for a system that handles peak load, so that the system never fails, even under peak circumstances. If you have the extra resources, why not design for peak load? It’s a psychological thing. We want the system that never fails, so that we can have just one system, and not have to think about having multiple systems, or cleverly designing the system to reduce peak load. It’s a sensible decision in many ways. It’s just that sometimes the consequences are not desirable.

Can we convince ourselves to accept peak restrictions so that the overall system can be more efficient? If my Netflix choice is any indication, it’s pretty hard.