Wardrobe Reassessment

I have a lot of clothes I don't wear. I like these clothes I don't wear, but I don't feel myself in them, so they need to go because they rarely come out of the closet. I'm cleaning my closet out, mostly of recently purchased sweater dresses, and they are all going to beautiful people who will love them.

I will stick to blue jeans, sneakers, cardigans, and t-shirts, preferably in stripes. I'd like more cardigans, so I've been looking at shopruche.com (thanks to Brig), but I really shouldn't spend money, so I will probably refrain. I can live with what I have.

I might, however, have to buy some jeans. I broke the zipper on my favorite dark wash jeans today. I'm not sure how it happened, but suddenly I realized, "my pants are not zipped!" Then I realized I could not fix that problem. It's a good thing I wear long shirts. :)

Wardrobe purchases from here on out have to fit the clothing persona I have recently discovered that makes me feel uber confident. Here's a sketch of the me I believe I have established and that I love. I really do have an outfit like this, and it's perfect.

It has been far too long since my last paint graphic. I should make them more often.

So there you have it--sneakers, cardigans, blue jeans, headbands, curly hair, and patterned shirts. I lurv it.

Retraction of My Rant

Thanks to NPR, I am now neutral on the insurance contraception thing. My rant was misinformed. Of course, I think that's how things often end up heated battles--misinformation. Since the difference is simply charging a copay or not, I don't know that this legislation significantly changes anything at all. It's null and void.

If you want to understand my change of heart, I recommend reading this: Rules Requiring Contraceptive Have Been in Place for Years.

They say it much better than I could.

Rant: Birth Control & Insurance

So usually I don't get into this sort of thing in my blog, but I'm just all steamed up about the issue of requiring birth control from religious institutions. If you're rolling your eyes and going, "Oh brother," keep reading. I might actually surprise you with the twist this blog will take.

I used to be a hard-core Catholic. Having been one, I tend to get really bothered when I hear things like "people should stop forcing their religion on others by pushing for anti-abortion laws. Separation of Church and State." Those comments always upset me because those individuals fail to realize that for the anti-abortion crowd, the goal is not to oppress woman (as I have often heard said), the goal is to defend life against murder. Just because you don't believe it's murder, doesn't mean it's acceptable for someone who thinks it is to sit by in silence. It isn't. From their moral perspective, that would be terrible.

Given my stance on that issue, you might think that I would fully support the Catholic Bishops in fighting the legislation that demands that they provide coverage for birth control through their insurance policies. Well, I don't. Not even a little. Here's why:

1. Institutions do not have rights. Our government does not exist to protect or defend institutions (or corporations for that matter). Our government exists to defend people. Individuals. Since this law doesn't force anyone to use birth control against their will, it isn't limiting anyone's access to their own moral religious decision making.
2. You can't tell me that individuals who will now get contraception covered by their health insurance would not have gotten access to it in another way before, so I don't think not paying for it is doing anything to prevent the use of contraception. Some might argue that they are opposed to financially supporting birth control on a moral level. I have little pity for them on that since the money is taken out from the institution before it reaches them, so again, no individual is paying for this. The entity is paying, and it is neither moral or immoral. If you're questioning me on this, read St. Francis de Sales Catholic Controversy. He really understands how the Church is composed of indviduals who have their own morality, but who do not dictate the morality of the Church as a whole.
3. I bet there are Catholic and other religious institutions out there that already provide birth control through their insurance and have for years simply because it might have been a part of a standard policy and they didn't choose to have it removed. I wonder how many institutions this legislation actually changes anything for.

I do have one area of ambiguity on this issue though. Some forms of birth control are seen as abortifacients because of the way they work to prevent pregnancy. That's crossing the line into the murder debate for the group of people concerned in this case, and I do tend to think they shouldn't have to put money towards murder, but it's still gray area, especially because I'm not 100% convinced of the existence of so-called abortifacients, and I believe they are pretty rare.

So in general, I support the requirement for religious institutions to provide coverage of birth control to employees. Those employees have rights. The institutions do not.

Feeling the Downward Pull

For those of you who also suffer from depression, you know that a high can be as rough as a low. With a high comes fear. Fear that good things will slip away. With this fear comes the same dark thoughts that come with a low. Is anything really worth it? Is it time to give up? The scariest thing about these thoughts on a high is that with a high there is no worry that someone will feel to blame. How can they? If everything is so perfect, it's hard for something to look like a cause.

On a more positive note, I've got to get a little drive back into my life for the purpose of coping. My major drive used to be my intense faith and as a secondary element of that, my writing. When I was a religious zealot, I felt like writing was my calling. It was my mode of evangelizing. Since I no longer am a religious zealot, I feel like my passion to write has fizzled out.

That can't be the case though. I wrote constantly long before I was an uber Christian. That portion of myself is hiding somewhere. I need it. I need to cut my Netflix subscription and my internet and force myself to find entertainment in constant reading and writing again. It's time.

Reading Smart with Gene Wolf

I finally finished The Fifth Head of Cerberus. I must say, I was surprised by the ending. I didn't see it coming until maybe the last 10 pages. Gene Wolf effectively kept me guessing. The best description for the book would be "anthropological science fiction." It's definitely a book about colonization but not in the usual way--hopefully knowing that won't give it away. I don't think it will.

While it's hard to adjust to the shifts, the form was brilliant. Wolf writes three different tales with three different narrative strategies to create one cohesive book. At first the elements seem disjointed and only loosely connected, but everything came together in the end so perfectly. It was genius, and the synthesis of such variance into a whole couldn't be more appropriate of an "anthropological science fiction."

I give it three out of four stars.

Fancy Weekend

So I went to visit Chris this weekend and had a grand time for the following reasons...

Firstly, Friday for dinner we had fish and chips from a bag. Complemented by beer. I love fish and chips.

Saturday morning Chris made me scrambled eggs and toast and then we bundled up and went outside to build a snowman. :) That's my kind of whimsy. By the end of the weekend, no one had knocked down our snow friend or given him inappropriate body parts, so that was a win as well.

Saturday during the day we were just bums and watched cooking shows on TV, and Chris read smart articles, and we talked a lot about food. I got some time in to read more of The Fifth Head of Cerberus too.

Saturday  night we went out for uber fancy dinner at The Grey Plume. It's actually a pretty comfortable environment for a restaurant with such high end food, but I wear jeans every day and wanted to wear the awesome yellow heels I just got, so we classed it up. Most importantly, I got to check off one of my life food goals--I ate rabbit.

To make sense of our meal, the Grey Plume does two smaller portioned plates for the meals, so rabbit was my first plate. They prepared it three different ways. The leg was my favorite.  It had a hint of lemon zest and they do pureed things with it so you can dip your main item in different purees to get a variety of flavors out of one dish. They served the rabbit with black walnut, strawberry preserves, and parsnip. Oh, and part of the dish was the kidneys. I am proud for having eaten the obvious little rabbit kidneys, which actually tasted good, but which were disconcerting to eat anyway.

Chris's first plate was a butternut squash soup. The Grey Plume puts purees and other food objects in a bowl and then they pour the soup over it so that you again get a sort of food diversity from one bowl of soup. It's kind of like a treasure hunt. The things in his soup included a rubarb puree (which was my favorite complementary flavor), blood oranges, a truffle marshmallow, and a spinach puree.

My second dish was brilliant for the first couple bites, but the flavor was so rich, I felt slightly tortured by the end. It was a chicken roulade with beet puree (the beet puree being the amazing yet overwhelming part). It also had gnocchi, pearl onions, and black radish.

Chris's second plate was sturgeon, which I don't really remember because I only had one bite, and I think the beet just blocked out my sense of taste. The sturgeon was served with black trumpet mushrooms, spaghetti squash, and spaztle.

Then we both splurged on dessert. We talked about sharing dessert because we were both stuffed by this point, but when the waitress described the desserts I was suddenly sold on a dessert we hadn't planned to try, so I surprised Chris by ordering my own. It was a good thing too because he didn't really like my dessert, and I didn't really like his. He had a rum cake with lime sorbet, cola gelatins, and a vanilla tobacco mousse. I had a caramel genoise (spongecake) with parsnip ice cream, pecans, graham cracker crumbs, and a caramel vanilla mouse. Mine was a salty, creamy sweet flavor which completely appealed to my dessert flavor preferences. It was the most amazing dessert.

After dinner we went and saw The Artist. If you know me, you know I like actiony science fiction and fantasy movies. I read for mental stimulation, so I want mindless entertainment from movies, but Chris thought I might like it anyway. I was suspicious I would be bored. Surprisingly, I did like it...a lot. In fact, Chris and I stayed up really ridiculously late speculating on the significance of the film--how it deviated from mainstream film, how it captured old silent film, what it did that was new. It was a brilliant film, and as Chris put it, it gave you time to think, which might be why I liked it more than other deep films. There was plenty of room for me to think, so I didn't have to feel overwhelmed trying to catch everything and process at the same time. The time to think wasn't boring time either, the pace was still quick. I might need to see it again because I have questions and ideas I need to test in rewatching. I loved it.

This morning I was trying to read while Chris was getting his news, but I don't do well with auditory distraction, so I kept watching his news instead of reading. Then I was interrupting his news by commenting and asking questions, but he's pretty tolerant, so he put up with me. For example, I always wonder about the "jobs crisis" because I know it's not really possible to be at 0% unemployment, and I wonder how we compare to other developed countries in unemployment. (Don't get me wrong, it's a concern to me, but I think "crisis" might be a bit overdramatic.) He explained that we're still probably better off than most of Europe (not surprised) and that 5% unemployment would be a healthy rate. It's sort of the natural rate the occurs with recent graduates, people deliberately choosing to change jobs, etc. If we dip below 5% that could actually be problematic--think Japan and how young people are moving away so they have a hard time drawing people into the workforce as others retire.

So that was my weekend. It was full but had a nice amount of down time, and I got a lot of brain time in, which I miss since grad school is over and the circle of deep thinkers has been dispersed across the country.

Grownup Financial Organization

So, I figure a good time to assess progress on New Year's resolutions is near the end of the month of January. My major goal for the year is to simplify my life and get rid of some materials things I have stored in the nooks and crannies of my apartment.

I've had a box of stuff to donate packed almost since I moved in, but I've thrown a few more things in as the month progressed--a pair of jeans, a sweater.

Yesterday, I took a serious step towards decluttering. I decided to tackle the chaos of paper materials exploding in my desk. I have a drop desk, so I just close it up, and I can't see any of the mess. It's problematic.

While I was going through the desk, I shredded things I didn't need, made a pile of things to file, and I came across a little brochure that I would have been tempted to toss, but I glanced through it out of curiosity and decided to keep it as an aid in financial recovery post grad school.

It's called "Money Management for the Time-Pressed," and it was put together by the editors of Real Simple and Money. I think it is probably my mom's since she reads Real Simple. Too bad, Mom; this brochure is mine now. Anywho, it has tips on credit, saving for retirement, reducing your bills--lots of useful tidbits and some great tools to help you accomplish financial goals.

One of the little sections was called "Cut the Clutter"--the perfect section to help me with my New Year's resolution and insane desk. It offered advice on what documents you need to keep and how long to keep them. They point out that getting rid of extra schtuff takes a "psychic load off your shoulders." I could definitely use that. So here's what they recommend for what to keep and for how long:

• Tax returns--forever. I have no idea where my tax returns are from high school, but would they really audit me for the pennies I made in high school?
• Tax backup documents (receipts, W-2s, statements, etc.)--6 years because that's how long the IRS has to audit your returns.
• Year-end investment statements--until 6 years after you sell (this works out okay for me since I am and poor and have no money to invest).
• Pay stubs--until you get your W-2 in January. That's good to know because I had been keeping them for 5 years.
• Receipts for home improvements--until 6 years after you sell the home, for tax purposes. I don't have a home, but I'll try to remember this.
• Receipts for big-ticket puchases--as long as you own the item, for warranty and insurance claims. Note to self for someday when I can finally aspire to getting a gas stove.

So after I organized the desk, I applied these principles to my tiny little filing box. It took all day since my shredder died. I was hand-shredding and using scissors.

For filing purposes, it might be worthwhile to know that you should also be disaster ready with documents (not just money, insurance, and fire-escape plans). They recommended scanning the following documents onto CDs and keeping one at home and one in a safety deposit box:

• Driver's license, passport
• Social Security card
• Health insurance card
• Insurance policies
• Mortgage and other loan papers
• Property deed
• Car title and registration
• Marriage license
• Your will
• Last year's tax return
• Bank and brokerage account numbers

I can handle that. Easy peasy since I don't have health insurance (yet), a mortgage, a deed, a marriage license, or a will. That's like a third of the list I don't have to worry about.

So there's my de-cluttering accomplishment for the weekend. I shredded a bunch of files. Maybe next month sometime I will tackle the CD making.