I'm Not the Only One Up Here

Love it:

Dana Becker points out the obvious in her new book One Nation Under Stress: The Trouble with Stress as an Idea, that if we are all dying internally from stress related issues -- and that is debatable, as stress as a health problem is a relatively new, and scientifically unsupported, idea -- the thing that is going to save us is not yoga classes and mindfulness. It's actual societal change. It's re-stablizing the middle class. It's changing the economic system so that the wealthy few cannot destroy the lives of everyone else with a few reckless years. It's building supportive communities that are not plagued with gun violence and systemic poverty. It's creating environments where women are not saddled with raising their children without subsidized day care, or partners who leave them to do all of the housework, and where women do not have to choose between family and work. And yet when we talk about stress, we still talk about coping and adjusting and juggling things on a personal level.

Too many of our real societal problems, from obesity to poverty to epidemic depression rates to violence, are blamed on the individual. And all of that pressure to maintain some sort of homeostasis of health and wealth and fulfillment keeps the individual herself from seeing the unfair pressures put upon her. It also prevents real revolution or change, when you spend all of your time trying to manage the stress of living in a crazy-making society.

The rest is over at the Blog of a Bookslut, where Jessa Crispin interviews Dana Becker on her newest book, One Nation Under Stress.

My Recent High Horses

I'm really really tired of societal problems being discussed in the media as though the solution comes down to the behavioral choices of individual women and families. On an individual level, you can mitigate a situation, but good luck creating institutional change all by yourself. Pretending like that's not only possible, but necessary, isn't good for anyone and not only ignores the issue, but redirects attention away from it. (Link to Jezebel and not New York Mag, because seriously, I am not giving them clicks from up here on my horse.)

I'm upset to see what's happening to a city I love. Haven't we all read or seen Children of Men? Bad things happen when you get rid of the kids!

There. I feel a little better.

Cat Crack

Or cat television, akin to plopping a toddler in front of Dora or Spongebob or whatever it is Swedish kids watch. It's birdfood combined with early spring (which apparently comes with snow here), and while it may be mildly cruel in a there-will-never-be-payoff kind of way, the cats are transfixed.

And the black one, who essentially is a mild version of a toddler, bugs me for attention less often while I'm writing.

Chai

I love chai. Caffeine doesn't always love me, but when we're getting along, chai's one of my favorites. And I'm not so sold on the super-sweet Starbuck's kind, either (Peet's is borderline, and you have to get soy). There's a place called Samovar in San Francisco that makes an amazing version, and when we lived nearby I used to buy their chai spice/tea mix to make at home. No powder for them--it was tea and spices, and then you did the rest.

Since coming to Stockholm, I've tried to approximate it a few times. I know it must be possible, because I've had chai like it at, oh, most every Indian restaurant where I've ordered it. But I wasn't mixing the spices right, or something.

Now it turns out that maybe I just wasn't cracking the cardamom pods before boiling them. Whatever it was, I have achieved an acceptable level of success, and I wanted to share.

Go here for many, many chai recipes. I made a blend of the 'traditional masala chai 2' using the pre-chopped kind of ginger and ground cinnamon--but it was, as expected when one combines cinnamon/cardamom/ginger, still pretty great. Also, go ahead and throw in the bay leaf and the star anise, if you have them. They're worth it.

And while making excuses for colonialism is one of the last things I'd ever do on this blog, as we sit through our second day of March snowstorms, I begin to understand the northern craze--no, desperation--for spices during the long winters. Makes a difference.

The Position of the Sun

February 1st, Stockholm

I learned recently that the technical definition of the tropics is whether the sun is positioned directly overhead. I was trying to explain to a ten year old Swedish boy how you know you’re in a tropical place, and I was leaning on the weather, the humidity, the wetness, even the creeping, unrelenting vines and trees that creep into windows and break up walls. And then we went to the simple English Wikipedia page and looked it up, and as it turns out, none of those other things matter. It’s all about the sun.

I can’t conceive of the sun being like that, positioned directly overhead, bearing down on the tops of people’s heads with the force of a hammer. I cringe for the delicate skin at the part of my hair that already gets more sun than it should. I imagine that I would need to hide, tuck myself away until the perfectly apportioned 12-hour night was upon us again, and I could safely emerge. The furthest south I've been is Hong Kong, technically tropical, but just barely, and I spent a lot of time in the shade cast by the vertical city.

The sun is low here. It’s one of the things that reminds me, in the midst of normal, daily life, just how far north we really are. The satellite dishes do that, too. They don’t point up at the nice, 45-degree angle here, not like they do in California. No, they point straight out here in Stockholm, facing you head on if you’re looking at them from a rooftop, and when we ventured north of the Arctic Circle, the dishes at the Abisko train station pointed ever-so-slightly down, tracing the curvature of the earth. In December and January, when I went out for a walk at two thirty or three, to catch the last of the daylight, the sun hovered, barely cresting the horizon, bright still, but so weak that I could look right at it, even with my blue eyes. I didn’t have to crane my neck, the way I did as a child, testing out whether adults were right or not about what would happen if I looked into the sun. No, the sun and I were equals, each with our own moderate light, each with our own perfectly appropriate warmth, regarding each other across a field of snow.

You lose things, living like this. You lose the guarantee of warmth, that strangely perceptible movement of molecules, coming from outside of yourself. You are your own powerstation, creating the heat that you need, preserving the heat that you have, taking none of it for granted. There is never quite enough, or there is just enough—I’m never certain which it is.  But the grandiose sun god has no power, not like he does further south. People here don’t have to bow or stoop. The sun sinks below the horizon almost as quickly as it emerged, demanding no homage, slipping away as easily as the sacred in the face of hypothermia. Life continues regardless.