Sick. At work because I need the money and because being at home is boring.

conversation

Saturday, 7:59 p.m. The cell phone rings. Sarah pauses her movie to answer the call.

Sarah: Hi there!
John: What are you up to?
Sarah: Knitting, drinking champagne, and watching Alien!

(Slight pause. John bursts into laughter.)

John: But Sarah...not one of those goes together.
Sarah: This is my strange yet dull little life.

Scene fades upon more laughter and chit-chatting.

Goodbye, Hoosierland

Today marks my official residency in the State of Michigan. I have acquired my plates, auto registration, voter registration, and driver license. I have nothing connecting me any longer to the State of Indiana; I'm a Michigander!

I thought I would list a few ways in which the State of Michigan demonstrates its superiority to the State of Indiana:

1. Michigan residents = "Michiganders." Indiana residents = "Hoosiers." Enough said.
2. Great Lakes. Michigan has many. Indiana has none.
3. Majority driver tendencies. Michigan: Extremely fast, continental travelers (Michigan has MINIMUM speed limits. Fantastic). Indiana: Barely brush the speed limit ever if at all, rarely travel within 100 miles of birthplace.
4. Vehicle excise tax. Michigan doesn't have one. Indiana does.
5. License plates:
a.) Cost. Michigan: far less. Indiana: far more.
b.) Material. Michigan: metal. Indiana: cardboard.
6. Grocery tax. Michigan: none. Indiana: lots.
7. Obtaining a driver license. Michigan: No written or road test required if you have a valid out-of-state license; the background for your photo ID is official-looking vinyl. Indiana: Makes you take the written test no matter what, and requires you to take it AGAIN every eight years; the background for the photo ID is a bath towel.
8. Countryside. Michigan: pretty, generally rolling, forested. Indiana: ugly, flat, bare.

More to come as they are discovered. I'm also ecstatic that next year I will finally only have to deal with one state in regard to my taxes. Big whomping sigh of relief.

in support of butter

Okay, so the only shows I really watch are on Fox. I don't tend to have a lot of airing television on my weekly agenda -- currently just Bones (which is on the LONGEST HIATUS EVER, it hurts me) and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Just enough to get a few mind-numbing commercials into my viewing diet.

There are a couple of commercials that bother me, though. First and always foremost, there are the Comcast ads, which in this backwoods area feature a Zen Buddhist monk and link Comcast cable to that amazing connection with the universe. I hate this kind of marketing. I loathe, abhor and detest stupid materialist commercials that shamelessly use a minority religion to push their products. Of course, really enlightened Buddhists shouldn't, according to their own philosophy, care about such things; so no one's made a big stink about it. But if someone used Jesus to sell AT&T, the nation would rise up in outrage. (Well, the Midwestern-Southern half, at least.) Why shouldn't we show other religions the same respect? Why can't religion be a tacitly understood "hands-off" subject for product advertising? I mean, come on. Ew.

But that's a rant for another day. Today's real rant concerns the second ad campaign on Fox that bugs me: "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter."

First of all, I've never liked the brand name. I CAN believe it's not butter. It doesn't taste anything like butter. Now, of course, margarine products have been advertised since we were little kids, so I'm used to them, but the latest ad sports the saying, "Now You Know Better," and shows black-and-white mockups of 1950s families eating entire sticks of butter on their dinnertime potatoes, and then flashes full color to I Can't Believe It's Not Butter, with the "Now You Know Better" running across the screen.

Now You Know Better? About what?

This morning on Fox News one of the guests, who, I think, sponsors this Now You Know Better campaign, was talking about unhealthy trends that people used to think were great. Here's the list of things he mentioned, in this order:

1. Slathering yourself with mineral oil and going out to sunbathe;
2. Smoking;
3. Butter;
4. Insulating your house with asbestos.

Soooo...butter is right up there on the evil list with skin cancer, lung cancer, and cancer-causing asbestos.

Wait...what?

BUTTER DOESN'T CAUSE CANCER, folks. That bizarre grouping is like listing butterflies alongside Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot. People love to tote butter's high cholesterol and high fat content, and link it directly to obesity, as though butter is solely responsible for the nation's weight problems.

Know what really makes people fat? EATING TOO MUCH. That makes people fat. Butter doesn't make people fat. And sure, people with really bad heart problems might want to stick to vegetable products; but butter doesn't signal your arteries to start building fat walls within themselves. Now, consuming entire sticks in a sitting, that's bad (and gross). But having real butter on your toast, or real butter on your baked potato, isn't going to kill you. It's not going to make you obese. It's not going to give you cancer. It's not going to cause a heart attack (unless you're teetering on the verge of one already). It's just butter.

I also hold the strange minority opinion that one of the best ways to eat healthily is to consume moderate amounts of well-balanced, all-natural products (as all-natural as you can get them). And I don't mean "all-natural" in the way the FDA does. I mean foods with ingredients that you can only find in the natural world, where man had no hand in tweaking or processing the chemical makeup. I tend to shy away from these freaky substitute products that people have come up with in the past hundred years, where the long-term results are as yet unknown -- artificial sweeteners are a biggie. But so are "vegetable spreads."

Do you really know better? Take a look at the ingredient list on regular Land O'Lakes butter. It contains two things: sweet cream and salt. The ingredients list on I Can't Believe It's Not Butter, or any butter substitute, is much longer, and includes hydrogenated and partially hydrogenated oils. We Grovers, if we dredge our memories enough, will come up with a few FitWell passages about the evils of hydrogenation. One of those evils: trans fats. Interestingly, incomplete or partial hydrogenation CREATES "trans fats"...and the FDA allows food producers to claim that their products contain "no trans fat," even if there are trace amounts of it within the products; the trans fat content just has to be below a certain percentage (according to Wikipedia -- fine, fine, yell at me for my sources -- if there is less than .5 grams per serving, you're allowed to call it 0). So margarines DO contain trans fats. They just don't have to tell you that. And trans fats have been implicated in heart disease just as much as cholesterol.

Yes, there are trace amounts of naturally occurring trans fats in dairy products. But evidently because they are naturally occurring, they are of a different (i.e. not synthetic) variety, and appear to be less unhealthy for you (though still not GOOD for you) -- and also occur in tiny percentages, as compared to the much larger percentages normally produced by the hydrogenation process.

Hydrogenation also transforms unsaturated fats into saturated or partially saturated fats; that's why margarines are solid at room temperature. So one of the criticisms leveraged at butter -- that it's a saturated fat, and those are bad bad bad for you -- becomes completely hypocritical from the margarine industries (which is why, I think, those blatant marketing bents have been disappearing. But the idea still lingers that butter has saturated fat and margarine doesn't. Wrong. Butter may have MORE saturated fat, but margarine's got it too). Oh, and let's not forget the kind of cholesterol present in margarines AS WELL as in butter: LDL cholesterol -- the "bad cholesterol." Since margarines contain saturated fat through the hydrogenation process, they also contain LDL cholesterol. Which is bad for heart disease.

So really, the only people who can claim their bread spreads are better for you than butter are the Italian restaurants who serve olive oil in its pure form for dipping. And if I have to choose between a fake saturated fat and a natural saturated fat, I'm going with the one man didn't screw around with, thank you very much.

Add to that the fact that the U.S. consumes much less butter than India, Germany, and France, and yet sports the world's biggest (haha) obesity problem, and you have to wonder, do you really know better? Is butter really so evil, just because a brand of margarine, attempting to sell itself, says so? If you moderate how much of it you consume, you're just as well off as if you use margarine, and you're also not putting into your body things that man-made processes have rendered artificial and potentially dangerous.

Besides, butter tastes better. The key, as always, is eating within a normal range of calories. If you do that, you can take a lesson from the non-obese French and eat as much butter or real cream or real sugar as you like...because in the end, you're not eating that much of it after all. And you'll have food -- real food -- that tastes like real food, and not hay.

So savor your butter. If you don't chow down on a whole stick in one meal, but limit your portions to reasonable amounts, why not go ahead and enjoy? Unless your doctor told you butter will kill you. Then you'd better listen.

Otherwise...it's just butter. And butter is just good.

ask not

I'm wearing tired like it's the hottest new fashion. My furnace was whistling like a tea kettle last night. My stove stopped working temporarily the night before. A snowmobiler was zooming around in what sounded like my front yard at midnight. My phrase for today is quoted from this shirt at the Engrish.com store: "Elvis is dead. Sinatra is dead. And me I feel also not so good."

And Heath Ledger is dead. I usually don't get all into celebrity news, but this one makes me sad. He kept his nose clean. He stayed out of the tabloids. He did a good job in all of his roles. His career was growing. And he was only twenty-eight.

I used to say of him, "He won't age well." At the time I was thinking of sagging jowls and graying hair; but I suppose it could also mean that he never seemed meant for old age. Which apparently turns out to be true.

And I was just talking the other day with Leigh Ann and we were reminiscing about his debut in Roar. And how we'd been following his career from the start. Two days later, he snuffs it.

I dunno. I didn't cry or anything. But I do feel sad. Now when I watch those movies of his that I own, I'll be thinking about how he's dead. And it will be weird.

And I feel really badly for his two-year-old daughter. Most people don't remember back to when they were two. She'll have such a strange way of reconnecting with a father she probably won't remember -- pop in his movies. Or maybe she won't.

Meanwhile crappy celebrities are blitzing their way through Hollywood in drunken drug-fogged orgies and schizophrenic breakdowns and callus promiscuity. And those are the ones that get noticed, and those are the ones that keep on living. Death is never fair, but this irony is pretty rancid. Although I guess one might say, if one were optimistic, that the really messed up ones need more chances. If one were less optimistic, one might retort that the really messed up ones are wasting the chances they have, and keeping your head down doesn't get you off the mortality hook, and that never makes sense. Not that many people really deserve to die anyway. But death is what we live with.

Headache today. I blame it on lack of sleep, which I blame on the rattly furnace vent in my bedroom, which has awakened me every hour on the hour every night for the past week, which results in mild exhaustion, which...

You get the idea. Yesterday I called the landlord about it, finally having reached a level of tiredness in which I could not forget why I was tired.

Starting to settle into my house though, and to enjoy being there.

The meds are kicking in. (Yay!) I'm going to bed earlier, getting up earlier, eating breakfast, and washing my dishes. All things I was beginning to think I had forgotten how to do.

Where's that Imatrex?

I want to make my excellent, improvised garlic rosemary bread. You bake it in terra cotta flowerpots. It's beautiful and scrumptious. I'll call that a Sunday goal, since it takes a long time.

i can't get no

My dating prospects are ever-increasingly-promising here in the small town where I live and work.

Last Friday Boss-Lady and I were out to the local restaurant for dinner and drinks when the owner of one of the local businesses approached us. This guy, in his late forties, is strapping and genial and talks endlessly of his horses. He's also a pretty bad flirt with anyone who has, or once had, ovaries. Boss-Lady and I always smile and make polite conversation in return for the drinks he buys us, and wait for him to go away. He's nice, but we have only so much input into the life and psychology of the equine species.

I've seen his son around town. Nice kid, well-mannered, gentlemanly in that small-town kind of way, around my age, quiet, but you can just see him thinking "little lady" as he offers to move this or that for you. Sweet guy. Maybe high school education. And fighting with his ex-girlfriend over their kids.

So when his dad came up to us at the restaurant, he had this "look." That dad-look that men get when they're talking to a young lady who interests their sons. He said that his kid thought I was really nice. I smiled and said he was a nice kid himself, and then Dad started hinting heavily that I should have Son "take me by the house to go horseback riding."

Oh no. I tried to put it off nicely, hem-hawing like girls do, but it evidently didn't work, because last night Boss-Lady was at the restaurant by herself and Dad asked her if I was interested in Son. She said she couldn't speak for me. (Thanks a lot. Now I have to be mean.)

Meg thinks I've got that reputation -- the one of that nice, single girl in town for whom the guys are setting their caps, that girl with whom fathers would love to see their sons, and don't mind saying so. "The Belle of the Burg," if you will. I think she's right.

I think it's funny, in that absurd sort of way. I need to make treks down to South Bend once in awhile to find men with college degrees, though; it's sort of rare around here. And it's not that the guys here aren't really nice, but I just don't see many fruitful conversations. They always run when they find out I like to read, anyway; might as well save the grief.

Oh yes -- for the record, I'm becoming Catholic. I decided in early December, having accepted the doctrine of the Eucharist. I've joined the parish RCIA class (they let me join late, seeing as I've gone through the preliminaries before), and Boss-Man is my supplementary teacher (since no one knows more about the Church than he does). For nearly the past two months, I've attended church every Sunday. Unexpectedly, I'm loving it. I just joined the choir (the director said, kindly, that they need help...which I've witnessed. It'll still be fun.)

Everything becomes final at Easter.

Boss-Man told me about a Labradoodle he heard about that I could have for free. I pointed out the harsh intrusive realities of an animal-hating cat, tiny house, and forbidding landlord. He tried to guilt-trip me. I told him everything would work if he would buy me a house, thus successfully shifting the blame. He accused me of being a girl. I still won.

moving on

Finally mourned my old apartment last night. I hadn't till then -- I was too tired, stressed, and forcing myself toward gratitude for the enormous change in circumstances. But the truth? I have missed my apartment. I lived there for two and a half years -- nearly the whole of my independent adult life -- and I made it into a lovely home. I had everything arranged perfectly; I loved the cast-iron, claw-footed bathtub; I dearly loved the wide-open, spacious, sunny kitchen; I enjoyed living on the second floor; I liked my large living room. The walls and the ceilings and the nooks and the crannies and I all got along very well together; the floor and wall space was expansive; it accommodated itself beautifully to all of my decorating ideas. I loved Saturday mornings in the peace and the emptiness.

My house is tiny. The windows all face the wrong directions for letting in light. The floor space barely exists and the walls are cramped. The kitchen is small and dark, the refrigerator weird. A dankness pervades all the rooms that I don't have enough money to heat really well to drive out.

Of course the biggest practical factor remains the change in environment: The house is safe. The apartment was not. I unquestionably love the lack of noise in my home that I don't create myself; I do not miss the television buzzes, loud parties, thundering footsteps on the stairs, and arguments that had become the norm in my apartment house, nor do I miss the break-ins, drugs, creepy people and broken security door. I love my wide, gracious front porch and the short drive to work, and I enjoy being able to sleep without ear plugs for the first time in...well, two and a half years (although the isolation itself can be problematic...the grass is always greener, right?).

But that's only the practical. The attachment was to the apartment itself, and I do miss that. Lacking a camera, I don't even have any pictures of the way it used to be.

Naturally in my nostalgia I forget how small and cramped the apartment was beginning to feel toward the end; I had grown tired of living in an apartment; I wanted a house. It would have felt a lot nicer had the events of my move not been so frenzied, chaotic, and swift; I had no time to grieve a little, or say goodbye.

So last night I grieved, and this morning I felt more kindly toward the house. It's not, and never will be, the apartment, which I still miss; and I don't plan to spend two and half years in it; I'm looking forward to home ownership, as soon as I can afford it. But it's still a good little place. I can do a lot with it; have already started to do a lot with it. And I think that the advent of summer and later light will cut down on the small-dank-and-dark feeling.

Everything's a process.

the little things

Tired today, but happy. I'm plowing through my RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults -- Catholic school) materials at a rate that astonishes me, mostly to stick it to my boss (who is my sponsor and supplemental instructor in this process), who thinks I'll be slower than I'm going to show him I am. Even twenty-six years into life, I'm still finding that spite is a great motivator. My brain enjoys the challenge, after twitching around in my skull virtually unused for the past (nearly) four years, getting mushy. As a result it is tired, along with my eyes, but fulfilled, like a nice big yawn and a stretch after a nap.

I also spent three hours this afternoon scrutinizing a couple of accounts at work. Not technically part of my job, but the fun thing about a small office is role-sharing. In that time slot, I hunted down a mistake that my then-colleague had committed eighteen months ago, which consequently screwed up two accounts. Meticulous, time consuming, frustrating...but oh-so-satisfying to decipher. Ah-HA. I found you. God, that colleague sucked.

Now it's time to close down the office and go grab a bite. Boss-Man's dog thinks he's alone in the office and is offering up a mournful litany of lonely complaints that sound mostly like howling. On some days when we all leave for lunch, we come back to an office that smells like dog breath. Neighbors say you can hear him all the way down the block. Cute dog, though. Standard poodle. Shy and talkative and klutzy and funny. Feet look too big for him, like a draft horse.

things perhaps and things above

The only things I long for more than the next, currently mythical Sufjan Stevens album are marriage and the Second Coming.

Which gets me thinking about the Second Coming and the hereafter, and remembering that someone (Dorothy Sayers? C.S. Lewis?) once said that in heaven all of the art which we attempt to render, with varying degrees of success, during our time on earth, will be awaiting us in perfection in heaven. Even the ideas that we never get on paper.

There's a danger in the self-comfort of that thought, of course -- rather like the danger of focusing so much on the hereafter that we neglect the now. Art still demands attention, work, craftsmanship, dedication and commitment -- right now. But it's nice to think that some of the things we can't make fly, the immature stuff that we discard every so often, will be made perfect themselves one day.

What really excites me, though, is the thought that perhaps every artistic conception of my favorite artists will there for my perusal and enjoyment, all the things they never released or got done. If such is the case, then heaven is going to have one enormous library of books and music and films, and one enormous art gallery. And we'll have the whole of eternity to go through them.

Broke two fingernails on a box of files today; since I lack nail clippers at the office, they're all scratchy. I'm writing letters to lawyers I've never met, sending them heavy envelopes that will necessarily go Priority Mail. After fourteen inches of snow the weekend before this, the weather turned warm and it's been raining the past two days without much stopping. The birds seem confused. I drove to Elkhart this morning to file the papers in the box that broke my nails, and which I'm sending with the letters to the lawyers I've never met. Didn't get lost. The snowblades on the wipers squeaked on the windshield. A perfect day to listen to Sufjan sing about Michigan and wish I could be in his chorus.