End Radio Silence

Apologies for the sudden absence. A hairline fracture sidelined me for a bit. I might have gotten a little too eager to bring my bike out in early spring, spurred on by the apparent success of the local Stockholmare in doing so. Didn't quite factor in the continued existence of occasional ice and slush.

That said, I'm healing! The orthopedist is so proud he told me to go away and not worry about coming back. I can't swim, do anything that might cause a fall (ie, running and biking) for six weeks, or do dishes. But I can, once again, type with both hands. And I can hold our cat down moderately well for his eye cream three times a day. So, progress.

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.