My Adult Trike: Pros, Cons, and Shameless Evangelizing

Greta on adult tricycle, Louise
I have a new thing! It’s a toy, a mode of transportation, an exercise helper, and a thing to get all excited about. Let me introduce you to my tricycle, Louise. (Yes, she’s named after the character in Bob’s Burgers.)

I was recently diagnosed with mild arthritis in my ankles. I can walk fine, but I can’t walk as far as I used to. Which fucking SUCKS: for years, walking has been my main form of both exercise and transportation. I needed something to replace both. Hence, Louise.

I’ve been riding Louise about a month. I am super excited about her, and am going to evangelize shamelessly. I like to evangelize honestly, though. Compared to a regular two-wheeled bicycle, there are some downsides to a trike. So I’ll fill you in on those as well.

Why did I get a trike instead of a bike? And why do I like it so much?

Continue reading “My Adult Trike: Pros, Cons, and Shameless Evangelizing”

My Adult Trike: Pros, Cons, and Shameless Evangelizing
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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Gym Class

Children playing in park
I hated gym class. Like so many other nerdy, awkward kids, I despised it. I was bad at it; I was scared of it; it was a place of exclusion and shame.

And then almost overnight, I started liking gym. I didn’t just stop hating it — I actually enjoyed it. I looked forward to it. I had fun with it. And I was good at it. I vividly remember my nerdy math-teacher father jokingly scolding me about my report card one quarter, scowling and asking with mock disapproval how a daughter of his could have gotten an A in gym.

What happened?

I didn’t change overnight. I didn’t suddenly become a jock; I didn’t suddenly get good at playing with others or remembering the rules of the games. So what happened?

I was able to pick my own gym classes.

Continue reading “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Gym Class”

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Gym Class

“By the way…” Gilda, and a Neat Bit of Exposition

Gilda movie poster

Mild spoilers for Gilda.

I just saw a neat bit of narrative exposition, and I wanted to mention it.

I was watching Gilda, a noir film set in a fancy underground casino in Buenos Aires in the 40s. I was just starting to wonder when exactly in the 40s it took place — when the main character/narrator, Johnny, says, quickly and offhandedly, “By the way, about that time, the war ended.” And there’s a quick shot of a newspaper headline saying, “GERMANY SURRENDERS,” before the story moves on.

“By the way, about that time, the war ended.”

I love it.

It doesn’t just establish the time. It establishes Johnny’s relationship to the time, and to the world. We don’t simply get the cliche of the spinning newspaper headline. We get “By the way,” and, “About that time.” Which tells us something about Johnny. (Or possibly the culture of rich people in Argentina gambling in fancy illegal casinos. Or both.) It tells us that World War II was only of incidental interest, and his attention was on other things. It tells of deep detachment and self-involvement.

And it tells of a certain cynical pleasure in that detached self-involvement. Of course Johnny knows that, for most people, the end of World War II wouldn’t have happened “by the way.” The moment they learned of it would be burned in their brain — not something that happened “around that time.” Even now in 2023, 78 years after the war ended and 77 years after the movie came out, I hear this bit of narration, and I’m startled and pissed off.

It’s even more noteworthy because, a bit later, he recounts the first time he saw Gilda in Buenos Aires — and makes a point of telling us he remembers the exact day it happened. The contrast is jarring. Johnny knows that most people are pretty damned invested in World War II. He knows his offhanded attitude will be deeply off-putting to anyone listening. And he doesn’t care. This tiny bit of dialog demonstrates his detachment, not only from the world around him, but from us.

All in nine words.

The movie overall is a bit uneven: strong start, iffy finish, with both strong and iffy bits in between. But this? Chef’s kiss. Nicely done.

“By the way…” Gilda, and a Neat Bit of Exposition

What Is Healthy Food?

Picnic basket on a dock

(Content note: food, passing mentions of disordered eating, depression, vomiting, trauma)

What does it mean to “eat healthy”? Let’s narrow this down a bit.

What’s healthy food for someone with a wasting disease? What’s healthy food for someone with a history of disordered eating? What’s healthy for a marathon runner? A gymnast? A weightlifter? A couch potato who bikes on weekends?

What does it mean for a fifteen-year-old to eat healthy? How about a seventy-year-old? A five-year old? What’s healthy for a five-year-old who’s a super picky eater, even compared to other five-year-olds? What’s healthy for someone with morning sickness? Pregnancy cravings? Hyperemesis gravidarum (persistent severe vomiting during pregnancy)?

What’s healthy for a supertaster? A vegan? An autistic person, or someone with other sensory sensitivities? Someone with food allergies? Someone with a limited food budget? Someone who just doesn’t like vegetables no matter how they’re cooked? What’s healthy for someone in California, who has year-round access to fresh local produce? For someone in Chicago, who abso-fucking-lutely doesn’t have that? What’s healthy for someone in Bangkok? Havana? Paris? Memphis?

What’s healthy eating for someone with a history of food-related trauma? What’s healthy for someone who has strong cultural connections with the food they eat — connections that help them survive and flourish? What’s healthy for someone who’s finally giving up on dieting and is working to love their body the way it is? What’s healthy for someone with depression, for whom food is their only reliable source of pleasure? Or for someone with depression who struggles to eat at all?

Please. For the love of fuck. For the love of all that is beautiful in this world. Please, PLEASE, stop talking about “healthy food” as if it were a generic concept. Please stop talking about “healthy food” as if it meant the same thing for everyone.

There are only a handful of behaviors that are broadly healthy for most people. Eat some fruits and vegetables; move your body; drink water; don’t smoke; get a decent amount of sleep. And even these don’t all apply to absolutely everyone. See above.

If you want to “eat healthier,” think about what that might mean for you. Maybe question some unexamined biases you might have — about the supposed connection between weight and health*, for instance, or the assumptions we make about health and social class. Think about what health means for you. Do what works for you. And please, please, shut the hell up about the rest of us. Thanks.

 

*I urge you to listen to the Maintenance Phase podcast, or read “You Just Need to Lose Weight” and 19 Other Myths About Fat People by Aubrey Gordon.

What Is Healthy Food?

White-Collar Grifters and Prison Abolition

Let’s look at a seeming contradiction. I am — more or less — in favor of prison abolition. (I’ll get to what that means in a moment.)

And I also want big-ticket white-collar criminals to rot in jail.

This seems like a contradiction. I think it’s not.

Here’s the thing. Yes, I support prison abolition and defunding police. But I don’t support doing either of those immediately. I don’t know anyone who does. Defunding police doesn’t mean “immediately abolish all police forces and replace them with nothing.” And prison abolition doesn’t mean “open all the prison gates today and let everyone go.” It’s a process.

Prison abolition is a process. And I don’t want that process to start with rich, white, white-collar grifters. I want it to start with people convicted of drug war crimes and non-violent property crimes. I want it to start with dismantling the school-to-prison pipeline, putting the hammer down on racist police abuses, exploding the drug war into a million pieces. I don’t want it to start with Elizabeth Holmes.

Continue reading “White-Collar Grifters and Prison Abolition”

White-Collar Grifters and Prison Abolition

Pizza Beans, Simplified

(Recipe below the jump.)

I am so excited about Pizza Beans! I just made them for the first time, and now I want them in our freezer always. They’re easy, hearty, delicious, and super-vegetal. They freeze really well. And it’s a very adaptable recipe.

I got the recipe from Smitten Kitchen. But it looked a little more complicated than it needed to be — until I realized that three-quarters of the recipe was “make a tomato sauce with vegetables.” We already have tomato sauce. We always have tomato sauce. Every summer I make and freeze enormous batches of tomato sauce, like Frederick the mouse gathering sun rays for the winter. Any recipe that starts with making a tomato sauce can be immediately short-cut.

So I thought: How can I simplify this?

Here is my simplified version of Pizza Beans. I realize that “simplified” may not mean the same to everyone as it does to me. For me, “simplifying” a recipe means “taking the numbers out and highlighting all the flexible parts that can be easily changed.” If you prefer recipes with numbers and specific ingredients, check out the Smitten Kitchen version — or just Google “pizza beans,” there’s lots of variations.

Continue reading “Pizza Beans, Simplified”

Pizza Beans, Simplified

Would Al Gore Have Won? A Popular Vote Fallacy

Group holding vote signs

I’ll get this out of the way first: The electoral college sucks. It’s grossly undemocratic. It sucks for a jillion reasons, and we should dump it.

And also: When people criticize the electoral college, they often make a large, important mistake.

One of the most common arguments against the electoral college is that the person with the most votes should win. Like, duh. But (the argument goes) several candidates for President have lost their elections — even though they won the popular vote. It happened with Al Gore in 2000, and Hillary Clinton in 2016. And that’s not right. If we’d had a normal, popular vote election, the argument goes, these candidates would have won.

But here’s the problem. If we hadn’t had the electoral college, candidates for President would have campaigned differently — which means the popular vote would have been different.

So we can’t say with any kind of certainty who would have won those elections.

Continue reading “Would Al Gore Have Won? A Popular Vote Fallacy”

Would Al Gore Have Won? A Popular Vote Fallacy

Batman and Robin Hood: Franchises and Folk Tales

Banner ad for The Lego Batman Movie
(Mild spoilers for The Lego Batman Movie, which btw is freaking brilliant)

Yes, I’m starting to get tired of movie franchises. It’s getting a little old. The sheer bulk of canon in the Marvel Cinematic Universe offers little room for new storytelling: for a while they were weaving a web, spinning new strands in the gaps, but that web is becoming a dense, impenetrable clump, with almost no space for even the best imagination to work. And I’m not sure how another reboot/recast of Batman will add much to the world. I think my friend Chip said it best: “In the future, everyone will play Batman for fifteen minutes.” Do we really need that?

But I don’t hate the very idea of franchises and reboots. I don’t find them inherently repetitive or formulaic (although they sometimes are). I often find them deeply resonant. And I’m finding it useful to reframe them as folktales. Continue reading “Batman and Robin Hood: Franchises and Folk Tales”

Batman and Robin Hood: Franchises and Folk Tales

Bernie Madoff’s 17th Floor, and the Office of Vito Corleone

I’ve been watching the Bernie Madoff documentary on Netflix, Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street. (I suppose I could twit the creators for the unimaginative title, but I’m the one who named my blog Greta Christina’s Blog, so.) And there’s something that keeps jumping out at me, maybe because it’s such a strong visual image in a story full of paper and numbers: the 17th floor.

Madoff had a sleek, fancy office on the 19th floor of a sleek, fancy office building. But he had another office in the same building — the 17th floor. That’s where the machinery of the Ponzi scheme was happening: falsifying documents, cooking the books, flat-out forgery. Very few people saw the 17th floor. But the ones who did all commented on how strikingly different it looked. It wasn’t sleek and modern and classy. It was run-down, badly organized, with old computers and crappy furniture and boxes piled all over the place.

But this was the real office. This is where the real work was done.* The classy offices on the 19th floor created the illusion of brilliant financial minds managing the complex world of finance that we puny peasants can’t even comprehend. The actual work happened on the 17th floor — the work of fraud and deception and theft.

And I started thinking about The Godfather. Continue reading “Bernie Madoff’s 17th Floor, and the Office of Vito Corleone”

Bernie Madoff’s 17th Floor, and the Office of Vito Corleone

The Queer Version Of Get Out?

What would a queer version of Get Out be like? How would you turn the everyday horrors of queer lives into a literal horror show?

When I first saw Get Out, I almost immediately started thinking about what the queer equivalent would be. The women’s equivalent is often seen as Rosemary’s Baby, but Roman Polanski can go straight to hell and he sure as shit doesn’t get to tell our story. There are way better examples: my favorite is probably Season 1 of Jessica Jones, which had me crawling out of my skin, fascinated and repelled, both wanting to turn away and feeling compelled to keep watching. (Yes, that’s a rave review. It’s so good!)

So what would a queer equivalent be? It would probably focus on body horror and bodily control, like Get Out and Jessica Jones and other horror shows about oppression. But what, specifically, would make it queer?

Invisibility and visibility. These keep grabbing my mind, and won’t let go. Continue reading “The Queer Version Of Get Out?

The Queer Version Of Get Out?