Sin of the Month

I had begun dieting at age thirteen, when my idea of abstemiousness was to buy low-cal cookies at Walgreen's and eat the whole box.

When I began writing this monthly column a gazillion years ago, it was in order to discuss each of the Seven Deadly Sins.  The trouble with that, as you will know if your math skills are beyond the second grade level, which mine are not, is that to do this takes approximately, oh, seven months or so, at which point, one runs out of sins.  This is how I was forced to begin making up sins, some of which, such as "Inadequate Lawn Care" and "Bad Hair," were not quite as deadly as they ought perhaps to have been.
   
But every so often, I have occasion to revisit one of the original Seven Deadlies.  At this time of year, as the days grow shorter and the hours in which one is forced to stand around buffet tables gorging oneself grow longer, one's thoughts inevitably turn to everyone's favorite sin, Gluttony. 
   
For a precise, if unreliable, definition of the term, I decided to consult the font of random information that is Wikipedia.  As I tell students, Wikipedia is a totally unacceptable source for research, and there is a special evil laugh teachers reserve for anyone who cites it in a paper.  One can't mention the W-word to any of my colleagues without being castigated.
   
However, I think Wikipedia has a pretty good take on Gluttony: "an anticipation of meals, the eating of delicacies, and costly foods, seeking after sauces and seasonings, and eating too eagerly."  Next to that is a little picture of me--no, I'm kidding, it's actually a little picture of you.  No, seriously, it's a picture by Hieronymus Bosch--of course.

Let's say we all want to have a road outside our houses.  We can each hire someone to come out, do an estimate, and then bring a bulldozer and cement mixer over to pave our twenty feet of road.

It is said that only two things in life are certain: death and taxes.  At least, that used to be said; you don't hear it so much any more.  These days, what you hear is that taxes are an onerous burden that should be abolished.  Republicans accuse Democrats of being "tax-and-spend liberals," and Democrats defend themselves by claiming that they will neither tax nor spend. 

President Obama campaigned on a promise to cut taxes for everyone making under $250K, and apparently, according to a recent New York Times article, he's done it: "What if a president cut Americans' income taxes by $116 billion and nobody noticed?" the article inquires.   Apparently, the Democrats' "signature tax cut" saved American taxpayers $800 for married couples and $400 for individuals, but that savings "has gone largely unnoticed." 

The reason for this, the article goes on to state, is that while the Bush administration sent out tax "rebates" in the form of checks, the Obama administration reasoned that people were much likelier to spend a less obvious infusion of cash, as opposed to depositing it in a savings account, and thus it would be better for the economy to disperse this stimulus money over time by reducing taxes withheld from paychecks. 

How can it be that in America in the 21st century, someone with top-notch health insurance can sit for hours in what is supposed to be a fairly decent hospital with no triage?

I was about an hour from home, driving back from New York, when my husband called me.  I answered the phone (using my hands-free device, in case you were wondering) and heard yelling and swearing: from what I could figure out, he had been opening a window in our living room, but it was stuck, so he gave it a little tap with the heel of his hand.  The window, the rippled nineteenth-century kind, had cracked and sliced open his palm.  I told him to calm down and call 911, but he said he was bleeding badly and that they would be too slow.  Then he hung up, and when I called back, he didn't answer.

When I visited Kyoto in the early '80s, I immediately declared it my favorite place on earth, and almost nowhere I've been since then has shaken it from its position.  (Its only real competition so far has been Udaipur, India.)  Of course, I knew Kyoto had changed considerably since then--everything has.  When I arrived there this past summer, I'd been reading a book called Lost Japan by Alex Kerr that lamented the demise of traditional Japan, so I wasn't surprised when I emerged from Kyoto's newish train station, a shiny black fifteen-story monolith, hailed a taxi, and found myself barreling down a city street that in no way resembled the graceful images in my memory. 

by Abby Bardi

Last month, just before I left for Japan, the Japanese prime minister resigned, having lost popular support because of his failure to negotiate the removal of US military bases from Okinawa, the issue on which he had been elected. 

Although years ago I used to teach on them, I could understand voters' aversion to the bases.  Okinawa is only seventy miles long and seven miles across at its widest point, with a fragile coral reef, and Henoko, the site of a proposed new base, is home to the dugong, a mermaid-like mammal who feeds on sea grass. 

My trip to Japan was to visit my son, who has taught there for the past four years, and take him to Okinawa to show him the magical island on which he had spent the first three years of his life.  Flying to Okinawa seemed like time travel, but when we got there, I found, not surprisingly, that it had changed considerably in the 26 years since I had been there.  Driving around the island felt at times like one of those post-apocalyptic movies where you barely recognize landmarks: there were new roads, even a highway; the golf course where I had always turned left to go home (there were no street signs then) had closed and looked ghostly; the red light district has been renamed Park Avenue and is now a genteel shopping area; the covered market that once housed the designer clothes store "We The Theme Produce of Ropé" is now shabby.

When I lived in Okinawa in the early 1980s, I often dreamed that I was leaving there.  In the dreams, I was surrounded by the ethereal blue-green ocean, heartsick at the idea of never seeing it again, and I would wake up in a panic.

I happened to mention this to one of my American neighbors at the time and she said, "Oh, yeah, everyone has that dream."  This was reassuring, but I kept on being tortured by it and waking up flooded with relief as I realized I was still on what the GIs, my students, called "the Rock."

Though the idea of a subtropical island conjures up images of paradise, when I first saw Okinawa, it did not look like one: its landscape was odd and misshapen and speckled with a hodgepodge of cement buildings.  I later figured out that everything had been rearranged during the Battle of Okinawa, a protracted World War II battle that killed thousands of people, including over 100,000 civilians, and then during the postwar period, as the U.S. bulldozed everything that was in the way, took over Japanese bases, and built new ones.  In 1972, we gave Okinawa to the Japanese but continued our expanding military presence there unabated.  In 1984, as I was leaving, the bases were undergoing a building boom because we had been kicked out of the Philippines, and apparently since that time, several more have been created.

Once a week, my husband and I eat at a Mexican restaurant just down the street from the Tribal Belly Dance class I go to on Tuesdays. I load up on carbs, then go dance them off.

Last week, one of our favorite waitresses, let's call her Willow, came in wearing a little gray tweed cap under which we noticed that she no longer had any hair. Since she's studying to be a cosmetologist, I assumed this was some youthful fashion statement.

She strolled over to our table and handed us a leaflet. It announced a benefit she was organizing at the restaurant for a friend of hers who had been in a car accident and had sustained a head injury. Willow explained that she had shaved her head in solidarity.

On the night the health-care bill passed, I had gotten home from work at ten, and I was starving; on the nights of my evening class, I tend to eat a frozen vegetarian gluten-free dish that tastes like cardboard with tomato sauce.  I guess that's why I kept flipping back and forth between C-SPAN and the Food Network.  The Food Network was showing an Iron Chef episode dedicated entirely to ricotta cheese, and C-SPAN was showing endless rounds of voting, and then some yelling that I couldn't quite make out.
 
It was clear, I think, that the blonde woman who made the ricotta sponge cake was in the lead, but the health care bill was definitely a nail-biter at times.  According to the judges, the cake was "like eating a cloud," whereas the health care bill was often alleged to be an expensive luxury that we simply cannot afford.  Whenever anyone tried to point out that the current health-care situation in this country has spiraled out of control, is already costing scads of dollars, and is killing people, they were accused of liberalism or worse.
 
But somehow, a watered-down version of the health care bill that we actually need, i.e., one with a public option, squeaked through, and while the Republicans immediately threw some kind of weird Hail-Mary-pass technicality, I had flipped back to the Food Network by that point and still don't really understand what went on.  At one point, I heard so much booing and yelling on C-SPAN that I could have sworn I was watching "The Prime Minister's Question Time," and apparently someone called Rep. Bart Stupak a "baby killer."  Last I heard, Stupak was ardently anti-abortion, but I guess all's fair in love, politics, and the bizarro-world of today's GOP.
 

Snow plows. Examples of bloated government?

photo by Eric Bond

I was planning to write about politics this month, but all I can think about is snow.  As I write this, filthy piles of it still line the road, trickling away at a pace that suggests that it may not be gone by June.

Maybe some people enjoyed our Snowcation, Snowpocalypse, Snowmageddon, but for most of us, it was much more like a hurricane or other natural disaster than a delightful winter treat.  Even if we didn't lose power--I didn't--the fear that it would go out and leave us desperately trying to stay warm while marooned by giant drifts gave some of us terrible claus-snow-phobia. 

When we finally hacked our way out of our igloos, we emerged with snow stories to tell our associates in warmer climates and, if we had any sense, a renewed respect for the power of Mother Nature.  (Remember that 1970s commercial for Chiffon margarine?)

When my husband dropped and broke his cell phone last week, we rejoiced in the fact that we had taken out insurance that guaranteed him a replacement in the event of breakage.

But it turned out that the insurance company could not in fact replace his phone. Though he bought it less than two years ago, the model was no longer manufactured, so they could only offer him a "comparable" model. There was also a $25 deposit.  We had been paying five bucks a month for eighteen months and were now spending $25 on a "replacement" phone that turned out to be a cheap piece of crap that we could have bought at Best Buy for fifty bucks.  (As you may have noticed in previous columns, economics is not my strong suit.)

I tried calling the insurance company to remonstrate, since the policy was in my name, and spoke to two friendly, patient young women who assured me that they felt my pain, but unfortunately, they said, there was nothing they could do.  I asked to speak to a supervisor and was handed over to a woman who had obviously received training in shutting down people with complaints.  No matter what I said, she had a quick answer, and at times I could tell she was reading from a script.  Unlike the lower echelon employees, she was neither friendly nor patient, and at one point in our conversation, I heard her press her mute button and I'm pretty sure it was because she was screaming.


photo by Eric Bond (from annual Halloween ZombieWalk in Silver Spring)