Suit yourself!

I just bought a bathing suit over the Internet. I did this before, about six years ago, but the elastic on that one was worn out, as I discovered when I dove under a wave in Mexico last summer. The experience this time was a lot more painful and yet inspired much more confidence, thanks to Lands End's Virtual Dressing Room technology. I had read about it in the NYT and even though I am not a young mother or an over-40 woman or someone who has had a mastectomy, I decided to check out their suits. It is absolutely true that they're not as stylish as J. Crew's or the Calvin Klein one I found last time, but really, there's no point in me pretending that I'm stylish. (If low-rise jeans would go away and never come back, I would burn an effigy of Gisele Bündchen in celebration.) I do have a relatively cute bikini for the sunbathing I really shouldn't be doing anymore, but I needed a tank for actual swimming. We're going to Florida in two weeks, and I can't wait to do some bodysurfing.

First I had to build My Model, which involved height and weight and picking hairstyles (they had my current one) and asking Hüsbando what shape I am (triangle, inverted triangle, rectangular, etc). The result looked somewhat like my figure, but not quite, so I decided to get up off the chaise (something I should apparently do more often) and measure for the more advanced option. When I entered my actual bust, waist, hip, thigh, torso and inseam measurements, the result was shockingly dead-on. I had a pretty exact computer model of myself that could try on swimsuits while I sat here in my pajamas! I could make her turn around and check out the butt coverage, the side view -- all of it. It was just like being in a dressing room, all the way down to the "Ugh! Get this rag OFF me!" reaction I had to certain suits.

Now, I can't say that many of the Lands End suits appealed to me, but since I was only looking for a basic solid tank suit, limited choices was fine. I narrowed it down to three and then called in Hüsbando. "Wow, that really looks like you," he commented. "How cute you are!" (This is why I married him, btw: the ability to seem sincere while always telling me what I want to hear when I need to hear it.) He liked my No.1 choice, so I ordered it: alas, the chocolate brown one is back ordered til July, so I ended up with black, as always.

I provide a screen shot of my model here as an educational service. It really does look like me. (Although I would say I am "bulgier" in places, if she were, I probably wouldn't be posting her. I also enjoyed seeing what she/I looked like 10 pounds lighter with more toned thighs, which if all goes according to plan will be me, mid-summer.) Now, why can't EVERY online clothing site have this technology? Or someone make it portable so you could take it with you from store to store? I would never set foot in a mall again if I could try on jeans this way.

Eat, think, and be wary

The Ethicurean, the group food blog for which I have been neglecting this blog, is now public after much brainstorming and hair-pulling over PHP.

Inspired in large part by Michael Pollan, five friends (including my kick-ass cousin-in-law) and I are attempting to reconnect with what we eat by seeking out tasty foods that are also sustainable, organic, local, and/or ethical (S/O/L/E foods, for short). Blogging from Oakland, Berkeley, San Francisco, Seattle, and Austin, we're planning to write about things such as:

• field trips to local farms
• foraging for greens in the 'hood
• raw-milk taste tests
• keeping an eye on Wal-Mart as it moves into organic
• interviewing people like Daryl Hannah, who's making a splash with her online videos about biodiesel and other sustainable lifestyle choices.

My co-bloggers are all really cool people who come from very different eating backgrounds -- thre of them have farming in their family, one has a proto-Slow-Fooder for a mom, and then there's Erika and me, who like to write with our mouths full. I'm totally psyched about it; poor Hüsbando gets to hear about nothing else, and he's being not only patient and supportive about my monomania, he's doing a lot of cooking! Now, if I could only manage to turn this into an income....for all six of us!

Mind the credibility gap

My friend Jennifer Nix, who I met through George Lakoff, has been written up in the SF Chronicle for the success of her latest project, How Would a Patriot Act: Defending America from a President Run Amok, written by lawyer-turned-blogger Glenn Greenwald. Her savvy marketing and people skills got the thing to No. 1 on Amazon.com before it was even printed. Sounds like a good book, and the advance video they whipped up to publicize it is strangely powerful and moving -- watch it at the end of this post.

I think Jen should run for president, or at least the Senate. I hope she finishes her own book soon -- Citizen Jen -- so we can petition her to run. (I promise to destroy the photo with me above, along with other incriminating ones we have stashed away.) *Update*: Jen tells me she's guest blogging over at Firedoglake. Her first post is a doozy, guaranteed to light your leg hair on fire and make you turn off American Idol and march on Washington. At least it did me. I'm so proud to know Jen I forgot to idolspize her, so my new routine must be working.

I am giving up "idolspizing." Right now.

Thanks to Mark Morford's column on SF Gate today -- which I really should add to my daily dose of enlightened, Buddhist self-help delivered by the wise Cary Tennis over at Salon -- I have realized that I must curtail my tendency to gloat over the implosion of people like Kaavya Viswanathan (plagiarizing author of How Opal Mehta...), James Frey (lying author of A Million Little Pieces), and JT Leroy (altogether fictional author). It just isn't healthy, mentally.

Morford writes:

It goes something like this: You gotta learn to celebrate success, no matter what. Welcome it and exult in it and let it breathe, toss a blessing to success whenever and wherever you see it, in whatever form. Because when you do, its energy will only come back to you and smack your life with hot licks of possibility. It opens things up. Makes space. Kicks down karmic roadblocks. Offers up lovely shiny things in your general direction.

Conversely, wallow in envy and feel resentful and throw a middle finger to the fates when someone else gets heaps of bounty and, well, your life will stink and stress and bleed like a tumor. Easy enough, right? Sound cheesy? Too New Agey? Too bad.

So, I henceforth renounce my idolspizing. When I read about how Dave Eggers is hanging out with Spike Jonze as they make a movie of Where The Wild Things Are, I will take a deep breath and exhale a warm feeling of gladness for him. After all, don't I want novelists -- especially those with talent -- to become pop-culture heroes more than the Paris Hiltons of the world? Basically, in times like these, we should be celebrating the success of anyone with an IQ over 100. There's a real shortage of actual achievement in this world, and Morford's right: anyone who manages to get their passion out there merely makes room for the rest of us to follow them.

Atheists unite. Now.

Douglas Rushkoff has a great post on his blog about why it's time for atheists to stop being tolerant of fundamentalists of all stripes.

When religions are practiced, as they are by a majority of those in developed nations, today, as a kind of nostalgic little ritual - a community event or an excuse to get together and not work - it doesn't really screw anything up too badly. But when they radically alter our ability to contend with reality, cope with difference, or implement the most basic ethical provisions, they must be stopped.

Like any other public health crisis, the belief in religion must now be treated as a sickness. It is an epidemic, paralyzing our nation's ability to behave in a rational way, and - given our weapons capabilities - posing an increasingly grave threat to the rest of the world.

He makes an excellent case for how the Bible was never supposed to be read as history, only as allegory, by its creators -- to show us how to behave under the mores -- and morals -- of that time. I would add that those who insist on it being literal truth have missed all the more important metaphorical truths: Love Thy Neighbor trumps a 2,000-year-old prohibition against homosexuality. Thou Shalt Not Kill trumps the prohibition to embrase the authorial god. Women are no longer chattel, we're free to eat pork thanks to meat thermometers -- why don't fundamentalists grasp that the larger behavioral lessons are what's important?

I feel that as an atheist I have no standing to argue with fundamentalists of any religion (although I do whenever I get the chance). I wish that moderate Christians and Muslims would take a more active role in condemning Bush's assault on the separation of church and state -- the man doubts evolution, for chrissake! Soon abortion will be illegal in half the states! We might as well be living in Iran, under an Imam!

I should probably only allow myself one exclamation point per blog post.(Thanks, Hüsbando, for the Rushkoff link.)

Best. Breakfast. Ever.

On Saturday Hüsbando and I went to the big farmer's market in Berkeley around 11 – this is early for us but I was intent on getting to Fatted Calf, the charcuterie I had just read about it in Edible East Bay, before they sold out. By 11:30 they almost had, but we were able to score some delicious breakfast sausage (lightly spicy pork, from organic piggies, meant to ask which farm but the line was long) and some fennel sausage. Then we moseyed around looking for the Thai place, intending to get lunch, but they weren't there so we decided to get the ingredients for a fine breakfast and go back and cook it right away. Which we did. And oh my oh my, was it delicious.

We bought some eggs from a farmer I had never seen at the market before, B'n'B Organic Farm. The man assured me that these chickens were actually pastured, roaming around on 40 acres of grass. (Hüsbando was dubious, saying he thought the man was telling me what I wanted to hear. Further investigation required.) He had five or six kinds of eggs and I asked him which were the best. He pointed to some ones that were slightly green, like an Easter egg that didn't soak long enough. They were from South American chickens called Auracanas.

"I usually sell out of these, because the vendors buy them before anyone gets here," he told me. Well, that did it for me – I bought them. They were $5 per dozen, about $2 more than the Uncle Eddie's Cage Free I've been buying, which I recently discovered to my chagrin are from the massive Petaluma Farms chain that also makes Judy's and Rock Island. Of course, regular old eggs from battery hens are about 79 cents these days.

Next, we bought some olive bread from Phoenix Pastaficio in order to have a vehicle for the incredible butter I bought at last week's market from some tiny cheese-making dairy whose name I have temporarily forgotten. (I asked the woman whether the cows were pastured, and she said yes, that they didn't even have a barn.) At Hüsbando's request, we picked up some white button mushrooms that he would sauté in aforementioned butter along with some of the green garlic I had bought last week. The mushrooms were pesticide-free and chemical-free but not organic – the seller said for some reason the price would be prohibitive … but they were local. After a few more purchases – like these delicious salmon cakes I couldn't pass up -- we hungrily headed home to cook.

We decided to do a little comparison taste test with the B'n'B and Uncle Eddie's eggs: Pastoral vs. Big Organic, if you will. The green eggs were different in many ways: the shells felt thicker, and the membrane between the shell and egg was also tougher. The yolk was a brighter orange, and seemed sturdier, more protein-dense in my imagination. You can actually see the difference between them in the pan (maybe not in a picture this size, but they're on the right). Taste-wise, they were about the same. I couldn't really tell any difference…but I bet I could if I had some 79-cent Safeway eggs! (Also, on Sunday I made my first ever soufflé from 6 of the remaining green eggs, plus leftover breakfast sausage, aged Gouda, and cheddar from the little dairy. It stood tall and fluffily proud and, if I do say so myself, was one damn fine soufflé. I credit the eggs.)

The breakfast sausage from Fatted Calf was so far beyond any commercial sausage that I have ever had that it was almost like it was a whole different kind of meat. It was fatty and spicy and salty and oh, just carnivorously orgasmic. (Ketut lounged around hoping to get some, but we wouldn't share.) Hüsbando's mushrooms were excellent, too – meaty and buttery and far more mushroomy tasting than I was expecting from the white button kind. Rounded out with the fresh strawberries from the market a few days prior, it was just the most delicious breakfast I have ever had – at home or anywhere else. We took turns patting each other on the back in between bites.

One thing, though – we weren't sure whether it was simply that the food was so measurably better than supermarket food (I think it was) or whether the fun of "foraging" for it at the market had added a special flavor to the meal. Whatever the secret ingredient was, it was the most satisfying meal I've had in a long time.

Sometimes I love my job

In September 2003 I met these two students, Maria and Vanessa Bailey -- mother-and-daughter transfer students -- and had a blast writing about how they ended up at Berkeley. They were so amazingly close: they were living together, sharing a computer, and commuting 45 minutes to school. Then I forgot about them.

A few weeks ago Maria contacted me and said they were graduating and did I want to write a follow-up? I did:

"Look out, world!": Maria and Vanessa Bailey — mother and daughter, roommates, and partners in crime — are graduating

Seeing them again and hearing about the three years that had passed for them was a trip. I was so proud of them -- and to work for a place that inspired them so much -- that I actually teared up in the interview! We had a group hug. I'm just a big softie, really.