my baby's in the white fluffy clouds

One of two things has happened:

1. I can eat nightshades again, due to some bizarre change in my GI system over the last threeish years. Thank my doctor for pushing me to try again I guess?
2. It only looks like I've been able to eat nightshades for the last two weeks, and sometime in the next few days I will literally explode.

I'm rooting for 1. I would be able to eat at restaurants again.

Random things:

• This morning Krinn convinced me not to write a mail client with the most effective threat I have ever had made to me. (Recently our office mail server upgraded, and while in theory getting new webmail and access to Apple Mail and Outlook 2012 should make things better, each of those three clients has some critical flaw I can't chase down that makes me have to run a minimum of two of them at all times. I now understand why people write mail clients.) She said: "If you try to write a mail client, all of your Shaymins will stop smiling." I think I actually gasped. The image is SO SAD. Good work, Krinn. <3
• I dreamt last night about being part of a band that did abstract process-as-performance shows where we dragged beanbag chairs on stage and had shitty rehearsals at various venues. It was awesome. I think the other members of the band were punk kids from our Pokemon league and from Albuquerque's. If no one has done this schtick yet, someone should. *finger on nose*
• rushthatspeaks 's blog (and in particular this book review) got me thinking about generation ships --- which, if I understand correctly, are giant spaeships meant to serve as a habitat for many generations of human as they go off to colonize some new planet. I mean, I have never actually read a book or really consumed any media that used generation ships, because I'm a very sporadic consumer of science fiction, but the idea in and of itself makes sense and has some plausibility benefits over AND THEN THEY WOKE UP FROM CRYOSTASIS ON "EARTH, BUT WITH CAT PEOPLE" or what have you. What it did get me thinking about was Lyotard's essay "Can Thought Go On Without A Body?," which I am pretty sure is in The Inhuman. He talks about the difficulty of producing machines capable of thought, with the idea of sending them outside of the sphere of influence of the sun so that  thought will persist after the sun explodes/implodes/whatever. The reason he thinks it wouldn't work is that machines don't have gender --- that is, some difference between some fo them that has an almost religious inscrutability and implies the imbrication of the other with the self. Or something, I'm butchering his argument. The point is, if I take that argument at face value, I actually think generation ships could be the cure for gender, if that inscrutable difference as expressed in the people on the generation ship was the difference between the people who did and didn't stay on Earth. Maybe? I dunno. Been chewing on it, figured I'd share. (Also: Does gender need a cure? "Curing gender" is not unproblematic, but boy are there some interesting thought experiments and maybe stories in here. Haha. "Boy." GENDER WHY)
• It turns out I can make fairly spicy lentil curry by just milling good black pepper into it until my arms are tired and then asking someone else to do the same. :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D I have been trying and failing to make reasonable curry since losing nightshades from my diet, and apparently the trick was to start from an Ethiopian recipe and modify, rather than starting from an Indian one? Once I've got it at "I know what I'm doing" I will post a recipe or something.
• I hate to do anything that even comes off as complaining about weather when I know a number of my friends are still stuck under snowdrifts, but on Sunday Rik and I walked for five miles or so and it was cold enough with the wind that my legs were covered in hives. Stupid cold allergy, and arguably, stupid me for walking five miles in shorts in February. It seems mostly better although my calves are still itchy as all get out, and while this is mostly not a huge deal I scratch in my sleep. :( I think as fashion disastery as this is, the best solution I have without spending money might be shorts, leg warmers, and sandals. ... ... ... how does one go about selecting good hiking pants? I don't know how to garment.
• There's still a long-form life update email... coming... soon... ish? Hope y'all are doing well!

I haven't shared a recipe here in a while, so here's the fried rice I've been making in variations for the last while. I started making friend rice a couple of years ago as a thing to do with extra rice and such, and then when I lost a lot of my diet because of picking up a nighshade allergy, it became a bit more of a go-to for me. After recently visiting Beatrix (bossgoji ), whose fried rice is seriously hardcore awesome, I've been tweaking her recipe and learning how to make it well and make it with the things I like to eat. I can successfully feed this to my omnivorous housemates unless I put natto in it (they'll even tolerate tempeh!) and postrodent liked it so much he asked for the recipe. Therefore, here you go:

FRIED RICE, YO.

(warning: I don't measure ingredients. If that bothers you, you may want different recipes from mine. Sorry! I'm compulsive about a lot of things, and weirdly one of them is not measuring ingredients, rather than getting precise quantities.)

Rice: I usually use jasmine rice because that's what I get 25lb bags of. It's best to have day-old rice --- I make fried rice when I've had leftover rice in the rice cooker for a day or two, but if you don't have a Neuro Fuzzy you should buy one right now you can just store leftover rice in the fridge for a day.

Sauce:

• a splash of lime juice (lemon also works)
• a larger splash of rice wine vinegar
• some soy sauce
• one or two diced cloves of garlic
• some grated or diced ginger (powder works in a pinch but isn't as good)
• maybe a spoonful of sugar --- this is important, it helps things caramelize
• something to thicken it a bit: Bea uses store-bought "stir fry sauce;" this worked really well. Unfortunately, her random store stir fry sauce was safe for me to eat, but the ones near me aren't. I've tried corn starch, peanut butter, and nothing, and my favorite was honestly nothing, although the peanut butter seemed like it would be really cool if I had a slightly different flavor mixture, so I may try it again. I kind of want to try tahini, too.

You can make the sauce in advance, or you can try to put it together while you are frying the other things and almost forget the sugar and dump it in at the last minute without stirring and then most of it will stick to the bowl but then you can pull it up with your finger and lick it up so it's not a total loss. But make the sauce in advance, it's easier. Or have a minion do it! <3

So for me, the base of basically any food made in a skillet is going to be some combination of garlic, scallions, and onion in oil. I usually throw in spices (here: a touch of cinnamon and cumin), and the type of oil you use really does matter. Interestingly, and I picked this up from Bea, for fried rice I've been using a mixture of sesame oil and olive oil. I'm not sure why, but it works.

Once the garlic is starting to brown, I throw in other things that want to cook for a whilish. This most recent batch was seitan [0] and a chopped-up carrot; Trader Joe's has this great broccoli/carrot slaw that is cheap and convenient, or you can just use fresh broccoli, or really most vegetables work. I've also used tofu and tempeh for protein sources and those are tasty too; soft tofu is actually really nice if you miss the texture of egg in fried rice from before you were vegan even though you mostly didn't like egg and it kind of made you sick. Hypothetically. ANYWAY. You put stuff in like you are making a stirfry and, uh, I think sautee is the technical term.

Then, once it's mostly but not entirely done, you take it all out, re-oil the skillet, and throw in the rice. Stir it around in the oil and cook it for a minute, and then if there are precooked things you want to add, toss them in for a minute or two --- I put in natto [1] or frozen peas here. Then you add in the sauce and the other stuff! Here's the part I have trouble with: Don't stir it for a few minutes. You have to let it caramelize and crisp up a bit on the bottom. I have so much trouble with stirring it too much, because it's sizzling and that means I should stir it! But no! It means you should let it go. Go clean some dishes. Realphabetize the spice rack because your housemates screwed up cinnamon and coriander. Go look at the internet even (but set a timer for three minutes so you don't get wrapped up in an argument about Deleuze and forget you are cooking). And then, once you stir, let it sit again. For another two or three minutes. And then one more time.

Then eat it! Because oh man it's really tasty.

[0] For seitan I use a modified nightshade-free version of the Seitan O'Greatness recipe. You probably just want to google "seitan o'greatness" and use one of those, because I think it's better with nightshades, but one of these days I will post a Rachel-safe seitan recipe for folks who care.

[1] I LOVE NATTO. I am not sure whether it is a vegan dietary deficiency thing --- I've read conflicting things about that --- or if I just love natto. But man. Natto. Sometimes I feel sort of weirdly body awful, and then I eat natto, and then I feel better. I dunno if it's psychosomatic, but I totally recommend it if you have similar issues ever. Also Selene (one of my cats) likes it. So it must be good!

• Further Confusion is super rad, although oh my god my sleep schedule. But it has been wonderful to see many of my West Coast friends, especially the Seattle folks I missed last trip. And there is Race for the Galaxy! And there are tons of furries! It's pretty boss.
• One disappointment: They canceled the pokemon panel, and I am missing the IU pokemon event to be here (SO SAD ABOUT THIS), so I have not gotten to dork out about Pokemon much at all. Luckily, I ran into a smashingly androgynous Silver cosplayer --- no one else recognized the costume, and we dorked out at each other for a while, and they fed Rik when Rik was hungry, and it was great. I'm a teeny bit tempted to do a Dawn cosplay now (since I could basically make my hair work if I just parted it to hide the pink) but I don't know if people at furry conventions would get it, and I don't know if I care enough to actually go to an anime convention just to have an excuse to dress as a Pokemon character. besides if I wanted to mack on people dressed as Silver I'd really need to do Kotone
• I am actually getting reading done here! Not as much as I would at home but, hopefully, enough. This week's reading in one class is about non-academic feminism! It is reminding me why I prefer academic feminism. :( Although there are some really great things being said, this whole "second wave and third wave taking jabs at each other every chance they get" thing is just draining to read.
• Also, Jessica Valenti's Full Frontal Feminism, published in 2007, which claims to make a significant effort toward intersectionality, and even has a chapter all about men? Does not contain the word trans a single time [0], lukewarm at best towards queerness, and handles race with gloves. I need to read it a second time in a different mood to see if there are things I like about it; in the mood I approached it in, I was just like ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh. But maybe I was looking for too much? Or at least letting my ugh get in the way of the things that are presumably good about the book such that we were assigned to buy and read it.
• Restaurants are for other people, but between a normal grocery store and a Vietnamese grocery store I am getting to eat more than trail mix, and that is good. Orange juice. <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3

[0] And yes, it's a pet issue, I know, but come on. I'd keep a running count of the number of times "genderqueer" showed up, but it would be too depressing. Trans is in the national consciousness, the way so many authors pretend it doesn't exist is just maddening. There really is no excuse. 2007.

Your weekly "not school, not pokemon" post:

• CATGIRL GOTH RAVE IS ON. We are booked for December 18th in San Francisco. This will be our sixth year; if people fly in from other places (I'm looking at you, Boston, Seattle, and Texas) I expect between us we'll set up some additional social events in the days before and after as well. Selene is looking approvingly at me as I write this post; you know you want to be there. More details and a formal invitation that can be passed around will go out in a couple of weeks.
• I lost two productive evenings this week to eating things I shouldn't have, both by accident. The first, my housemate was not only kind enough to make me a separate bowl of guac without tomato in it, but he even went and got new tortilla chips when the ones he had bought had jalapeno on them. (nightshade!) He came back with Tostitos with lime. This was totally not his fault, but still. :( The second was entirely my fault; I forgot paprika was a nightshade and was so excited that I had found a tofu curry thing that didn't use any nightshades. Yeah, no. Goodbye, productive Thursday night.
• In other "I am increasingly ready for a robot body" news, I twisted my ankle something fierce when my brand-new heels snapped --- the heel half-detaching from the shoe --- as I was walking down the stairs in my house. (Carefully!) They're handmade by an awesome company who I hope will either repair or replace them, but it's still kind of errrrrgh, since it hurts enough that I wasn't able to go hiking this morning and can't walk or bike long distances right now. It already feels better than it did this morning; I'm hoping I will be OK to take the bus to school on Monday and walk the ten-fifteen minutes from the city bus stop rather than having to navigate the campus buses as well. I do still have a cane, if it comes to that!
• While we're itemizing negative things --- commit your atrocities early, kids! --- yesterday evening I was getting a ride from a friend and while she was turning left a car came at us at like 50mph. Directly at me. Part of my brain enacted what I would do to get out of the situation were I driving, part of my brain attempted to communicate this to the driver (but I think came out "Guh!!"), and part of my brain prepared itself for death. I am darkly amused that that process returned the value "I was hoping for something more glamorous." By my recollection the car did not hit us; the driver checked the car and there was a nasty gash down the side where I had been sitting. I probably dissociated. No one was hurt, the other person hit and ran. "At least I wasn't on a bike?" [0]
• In other news, I don't have to spend my free days going to Ohio for work for a while! How cool is that? (Answer: VERY COOL.) I will miss the jacuzzi in the hotel where they know my name when I check in though. "Oh, it's the pink-haired lady who checks in dressed like a college student and leaves in the morning in formal businesswear! She gets room 409."
• Still don't want to jinx it, but the likelihood of picking up a Housemate #2 next weekend is like 80 or 90%; my "turn down OK to good people in favor of waiting for good to awesome people" strategy appears to be working like whoah.
• Anyone have recommendations for bike lights that, rather than optimizing for "being seen" like the ones I have, provide the functionality "allow me to see?" I have a halogen that theoretically does this but it's not really cutting it for me. While biking around here during the day is way tamer than Boscamberville, it's kind of a death trap at night; the students are insane and the roads are dark enough that I can't see. Since I don't yet have all the roads memorized, and where the potholes are and that sort of thing, this is a pretty major problem, and it's starting to be dark when I get out of class. I can't fix the student insanity (there is no way I would bike through campus at 10pm on a weekend night, I like not dying) but I should be able to fix the darkness, and it's getting dark earlier every day.
• This is technically school-related, but I got permission from my advisor to work on human/animal boundary things, and animality in general, in my research both for her class and in general. This is so cool, y'all. So cool. I have so much more to read now! I even got permission to do "some crazy first-person vegan furry thing" informed by theory --- this is the class where we're encouraged to write experimentally, which I mentioned before. We will see how this goes. I have already started outlining. I want to make this good.
• You know how lots of minivans and SUVs have those stick figure decals that show you who's in the family? I saw one the other day that was clearly legible as soldier-man gardener-wife basketball-girl football-boy baseball-boy and four dogs. I thought "Man, I wanna see one where both parents are women. Or where there are three adults. Or where their careers are things like computer-woman, management-androgyne, bookworm-child." I got to thinking --- how far into weird could you go before people would just start not seeing the weird and parsing it as something else? I think that a family that otherwise looked normal but had two gardener-wives and no man would read as lesbian parents, especially if combined with left-leaning bumper stickers or something. If you had two men and a woman, on the other hand, I think most people would assume one of them was either a grandparent or an adult child before thinking menage a trois. I think it would be interesting to see how far you could go before people snapped back to normativizing interpretations, and would be particularly interesting to compare this across populations and times. I was thinking "Somebody should do this research!" and then I thought "I'm a paid staff member in gender studies at a research university..." I'm probably not going to do this project, but I could, and that's badass. (Feel free to grab it if you want.)

[0] This particular situation could not possibly have happened to me on a bike, but the general case of "grazed by fast-moving car" would probably have been worse.

A couple people have asked me why I'm vegan recently, and it got me thinking about how some of the reasons are the same as when I started and some of them are rather different. One of the questions was in terms of what living with me would look like, and that was interesting for a whole host of reasons, not least of which the fact that I'm going to be looking for housemates very soon. So I thought I'd free-write about it and share and see what other people thought about it, too.

When I first started doing the vegetarian thing, in 2004, it was so that I could get fresh produce instead of cafeteria food while I was working at a summer camp, and because I couldn't afford much of anything else. It turned out that I enjoyed it, although when I got more money and a different job I went back to eating meat, then gave up meat and kept eating fish, and by the end of November had just said "screw it I'm a vegetarian now." But I pretty much rejected any political premise for this --- sure some of it was in the back of my mind, but at the time I was going all California health-conscious and working out like crazy (for me, anyway, which is not as much as maybe it should be) and I associate the decision with that more than anything. 

I did veganism for Lent a couple of years --- maybe three? And the last time, 2008, it stuck. Partially I stuck with it because I had become lactose-intolerant from going vegan earlier and it was easier just to cut dairy out of my diet entirely. At the time, I wrote "I am not vegan because I believe it is wrong to eat animals or animal products." This has changed; I don't go so far as most abolitionist vegans [0] and think that animal lives are worth as much as human lives. I think it's important to prioritize human life and experience and to consider the people preparing and shipping and growing our food when we talk about "cruelty-free" products and diet. And I think there are some situations in which eating animal products isn't wrong, or at least, its wrongness doesn't matter very much, since it's stacked up against the wrongness of starving oneself (or malnourishing oneself, or what have you). But for people who have the time and Internet access to read my rambly thoughts about veganism, and who have the financial resources to make most to all of their own food choices, I think it's wrong to eat meat.

The thing is... I don't really care if you do it. We all do things that are wrong in this sense all the time. I think it's wrong to perpetuate economic inequities, but I'm not sending most of my income to charity organizations or to the government. [1] I think it's wrong to go to war most to all of the time, but I'm not out there protesting right now. I think it's wrong to make individual transportation dependent on fossil fuels whose extraction and marketing is hardly "cruelty-free" but I own a car. [2] It is my assumption that people who eat meat probably work to improve the world around them in different tiny ways from the ones I do, and it's not my place to tell them they should be improving the world in the tiny ways I find the most important. (I'm also not going to try to convince anyone that being vegan is one of the ways they should choose to do this; other people have done it much better.)

In terms of relationships, close friendships, and housemates? It is convenient and comfortable to spend time with people doing the same tiny things as me, and I like having housemates who are also vegan biker queer &c. &c. I'm basically unbothered by vegetarian food in my environment but sometimes the smell of cooking meat kinda weirds me out. Luckily our new house has a vent fan over the stove, so as long as potential new housemates do a good job with the dishes, I don't really mind. Kissing meat-eaters can be weird if it's right after a meal, but luckily my current onmivore paramour (which is super fun to say out loud) has quietly made this not an issue at all without my ever having to say anything. [3] I like to be able to cook for people, and I'm happy to meet their restrictions when doing so if they have allergies or preferences, although at this point if their preferences include "every meal must have animal products" we're probably not going to eat together very often because that's not a preference I can meet in my kitchen.

The environmental veg*n idea (mentioned in this comment) also holds some sway for me --- that producing meat requires more environmental resources (food, water, space, and so on) and it's good to take up fewer resources. I've heard anything from "meat takes twice as many resources" to "meat takes ten times as many resources" and I don't know what to believe, but not even Serious Meat Apologists claim it doesn't take more so I figure the claim, if not the scale, is true. It's hard to sit there and pat myself on the back for taking up fewer resources with my food choices when I live on arable land and grow grass, have central air, and own a car. But at least I don't eat animals too, I guess. ;)

A lot of vegans are down on them, and often for good reason, but vegan fake meat products really help me with all of this. Sure, they're more resource-intensive than raw produce, and they're mass-produced, and they're not as good for you, and so on, but they allow me access to the kinds of meals I find nostalgic (vegan calzones!!!!! <3 <3 <3 <3 <3) and the kinds of meals I can serve much more easily to omnivorous friends. Plus, they taste really good. ^^;; Over time I'm working on making my own (spiced seitan!) and abstracting the things I cook away from "fake meat" --- like marinated tempeh instead of "fake beef in a box" --- but I don't think the concept is inherently wrong given the cultural and nostalgic value that meat-seeming food has for a lot of people.

I should come back to this at the end of 2012 and see what I think then. In the meantime, it's time to have some granola with soy yogurt, and maybe some juice, and then get to work. :P

[0] Some would, either grinning enthusiastically or rolling their eyes, say "yet." I don't expect this to happen, but I also didn't expect to get where I am now, so who knows.

[1] Well, that might be even worse, really.

[2] I care a lot about this one too, thus all the walking and biking and such, but if I really cared, I could certainly live without a car. I just don't, because having one is nice, and I'm unwilling to give up the usefulness for the principle. Whether this is pragmatism or moral incontinence  depends on your perspective, I guess.

[3] He did once taste of cheap candy, but what can you do. ;)