Time to End the War on Salt?

by Melinda Wenner Moyer

For decades, policy makers have tried and failed to get Americans to eat less salt. In April 2010 the Institute of Medicine urged the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to regulate the amount of salt that food manufacturers put into products; New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has already convinced 16 companies to do so voluntarily. But if the U.S. does conquer salt, what will we gain? Bland french fries, for sure. But a healthy nation? Not necessarily.

This week a meta-analysis of seven studies involving a total of 6,250 subjects in the American Journal of Hypertension found no strong evidence that cutting salt intake reduces the risk for heart attacks, strokes or death in people with normal or high blood pressure. In May European researchers publishing in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that the less sodium that study subjects excreted in their urine—an excellent measure of prior consumption—the greater their risk was of dying from heart disease. These findings call into question the common wisdom that excess salt is bad for you, but the evidence linking salt to heart disease has always been tenuous.

Fears over salt first surfaced more than a century ago. In 1904 French doctors reported that six of their subjects who had high blood pressure—a known risk factor for heart disease—were salt fiends. Worries escalated in the 1970s when Brookhaven National Laboratory's Lewis Dahl claimed that he had "unequivocal" evidence that salt causes hypertension: he induced high blood pressure in rats by feeding them the human equivalent of 500 grams of sodium a day. (Today the average American consumes 3.4 grams of sodium, or 8.5 grams of salt, a day.)

Dahl also discovered population trends that continue to be cited as strong evidence of a link between salt intake and high blood pressure. People living in countries with a high salt consumption—such as Japan—also tend to have high blood pressure and more strokes. But as a paper pointed out several years later in the American Journal of Hypertension, scientists had little luck finding such associations when they compared sodium intakes within populations, which suggested that genetics or other cultural factors might be the culprit. Nevertheless, in 1977 the U.S. Senate’s Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs released a report recommending that Americans cut their salt intake by 50 to 85 percent, based largely on Dahl's work.

Scientific tools have become much more precise since then, but the correlation between salt intake and poor health has remained tenuous. Intersalt, a large study published in 1988, compared sodium intake with blood pressure in subjects from 52 international research centers and found no relationship between sodium intake and the prevalence of hypertension. In fact, the population that ate the most salt, about 14 grams a day, had a lower median blood pressure than the population that ate the least, about 7.2 grams a day. In 2004 the Cochrane Collaboration, an international, independent, not-for-profit health care research organization funded in part by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, published a review of 11 salt-reduction trials. Over the long-term, low-salt diets, compared to normal diets, decreased systolic blood pressure (the top number in the blood pressure ratio) in healthy people by 1.1 millimeters of mercury (mmHg) and diastolic blood pressure (the bottom number) by 0.6 mmHg. That is like going from 120/80 to 119/79. The review concluded that "intensive interventions, unsuited to primary care or population prevention programs, provide only minimal reductions in blood pressure during long-term trials." A 2003 Cochrane review of 57 shorter-term trials similarly concluded that "there is little evidence for long-term benefit from reducing salt intake."

Read more:

via:

The Pursuit of Happiness

by Andrew Sullivan

As a child, when I thought of the future, all I could see was black. I wasn’t miserable or depressed. I was a cheerful boy, as happy playing with my posse of male friends in elementary school as I was when I would occasionally take a day by myself in the woodlands that surrounded the small town I grew up in. But when I thought of the distant future, of what I would do and be as a grown-up, there was a blank. I simply didn’t know how I would live, where I would live, who I could live with. I knew one thing only: I couldn’t be like my dad. For some reason, I knew somewhere deep down that I couldn’t have a marriage like my parents.

It’s hard to convey what that feeling does to a child. In retrospect, it was a sharp, displacing wound to the psyche. At the very moment you become aware of sex and emotion, you simultaneously know that for you, there is no future coupling, no future family, no future home. In the future, I would be suddenly exiled from what I knew: my family, my friends, every household on television, every end to every romantic movie I’d ever seen. My grandmother crystallized it in classic and slightly cruel English fashion: “You’re not the marrying kind,” she said. It was one of those things that struck a chord of such pain, my pride forced me to embrace it. “No, I’m not,” I replied. “I like my freedom.”

This wasn’t a lie. But it was a dodge, and I knew it. And when puberty struck and I realized I might be “one of them,” I turned inward. It was a strange feeling—both the exhilaration of sexual desire and the simultaneous, soul-splintering panic that I was going to have to live alone my whole life, lying or euphemizing, concocting some public veneer to hide a private shame. It was like getting into an elevator you were expecting to go up, the doors closing, and then suddenly realizing you were headed down a few stories. And this was when the future went black for me, when suicide very occasionally entered my mind, when my only legitimate passion was getting A grades, because at that point it was all I knew how to do. I stayed away from parties; I didn’t learn to drive; I lost contact with those friends whose interest suddenly became girls; and somewhere in me, something began to die.

They call it the happiest day of your life for a reason. Getting married is often the hinge on which every family generation swings open. In my small-town life, it was far more important than money or a career or fame. And I could see my grandmother’s point: the very lack of any dating or interest in it, the absence of any intimate relationships, or of any normal teenage behavior, did indeed make me seem just a classic loner. But I wasn’t. Because nobody is. “In everyone there sleeps/A sense of life lived according to love,” as the poet Philip Larkin put it, as well as the fear of never being loved. That, as Larkin added, nothing cures. And I felt, for a time, incurable.

Read more:

Busted Watchdog

Is the Better Business Bureau a protection racket?

[ed.  I have business friends that say, emphatically, yes.]

by Timothy Noah

If you want to check up on the bona fides of your plumber or your electrician, you contact your local chapter of the Better Business Bureau. Lately, though, news organizations have been questioning the BBB's own bona fides. The BBB's rating system, they say, is at best uninformed and at worst corrupt.

Until recently, the BBB had a reputation on par with motherhood and apple pie. The Better Business Bureau is a national network of local nonprofit groups that evolved during the early years of the 20th century to expose fraud—initially mainly patent medicines and stock swindles—in America's burgeoning advertising industry. From the start businesses were encouraged to join, but the imperative was that honest businesses had an interest in cracking down on dishonest practices that gave unscrupulous competitors an unfair advantage.

In these early days, explains Kerry Ellen Pannell, associate professor of economics and dean of faculty at DePauw University (on whose 2002 paper "Origins of the Better Business Bureau: A Private Regulatory Institution in the Progressive Era" I rely here), BBBs spent most of their time either suing fraudulent businesses or lobbying state and local governments for stiffer consumer protections. Member businesses' names were made public in local BBBs' annual reports, but this information was not widely disseminated. Until the 1950s member businesses weren't permitted to publicize their BBB membership; BBB ratings ("satisfactory" or "unsatisfactory" and then, starting in 2009, letter grades) came later still. The BBBs recognized that such publicity might corrupt businesses into using their membership fees to bribe local BBBs. Worse still, it might corrupt local BBBs into using membership fees to shake down businesses, effectively turning the BBB into a protection racket.

That's not far from what has happened, according to a January 2009 article by David Lazarus in the Los Angeles Times and a November 2010 story by Brian Ross of ABC News' 20/20. (Dan Mitchell also had a good story about this July 20 in Slate's late, lamented sister publication The Big Money.) Both the L.A. Times and the 20/20 stories led with the mysteriously poor grades the BBB gave restaurants owned by chef-to-the-stars (and BBB nonmember) Wolfgang Puck—a B-minus for his flagship Spago in Beverly Hills, according to the L.A. Times, and an F for some of his other restaurants, according to 20/20. On 20/20, Ross further reported that two other nonmember businesses—the Ritz-Carlton in Boston and Disneyland in Anaheim, Calif., (which, Ross duly noted, is owned by ABC's corporate parent)—had both received an F. Puck told 20/20's Ross that the BBB was punishing him for not joining. "If you become a member," Puck said, "[they think] you should get an A. But if you don't pay, it's very difficult to get an A." It was an outrageous accusation, but Ross and the L.A. Times' Lazarus found evidence to support it.

Lazarus reported that in searching through the BBB's North American database he found that "the roughly 400,000 accredited businesses, even those that get numerous complaints, very often receive higher grades than unaccredited companies with spotless complaint records." When Lazarus asked Stephen Cox, then-spokesman for the Council of Better Business Bureaus, to explain, Cox's answer wasn't reassuring: "There is no guarantee that an accredited business will get an A-plus." (Nearly two years later, Cox, who had since been promoted to chairman, had a better answer for Ross: "We have more than 500,000 nonaccredited businesses who have A ratings.") But Cox conceded to Lazarus that you couldn't qualify for an A-plus unless you were a member company—a criterion the BBB Web site didn't bother to acknowledge. In fact, Lazarus reported, any company could raise its grade by one-half (from B-minus, for instance, to B) merely by joining.

Or maybe by more than one-half. Cameras from 20/20 rolled while two small-business owners phoned the Southern California BBB chapter to complain about their ratings. Both were told by BBB telemarketers that if they joined the BBB their ratings would improve. Both agreed to join, giving their credit card numbers, and both saw their ratings rise within 24 hours—a C and a C-minus each upgraded to A-plus. "That is in violation of our sales policy," said Cox when confronted with this information. "I believe they are anomalies."

Read more:

Sousveillance

 by Clive Thompson

When Mans Adler founded Bambuser—a Sweden-based service that lets people broadcast live video from their cell phones to the Internet—his idea was simply to help users share their lives with friends in real time. Early this year, however, Adler saw an explosion of use from a political powder keg: Egypt.

During the Arab Spring, pro-democracy activists discovered that Bambuser let them thwart the Egyptian secret police. If a protester filmed an incident of police brutality, it didn’t matter whether they were arrested and their phone confiscated: The footage had already streamed to the world, where it catalyzed political energy against the Mubarak regime.

“The police thought, if we take all the phones, we can control the information. But they didn’t,” Adler notes. “The message still got out.”

The Arab uprisings showed that the use of video as a monitoring tool has shifted decisively. Throughout the ’90s and ’00s, civil libertarians worried about governments and corporations slapping up surveillance cameras all over the place. The fear was that they’d be used as tools of oppression. But now those tools are being democratized, and we are witnessing an emerging culture of “sousveillance.”

Sousveillance is the monitoring of events not by those above (surveiller in French) but by citizens, from below (sous-). The neologism was coined by Steve Mann, a pioneer in wearable computing at the University of Toronto. In the ’90s, Mann rigged a head-mounted camera to broadcast images online and found that it was great for documenting everyday malfeasance, like electrical-code violations. He also discovered that it made security guards uneasy. They’d ask him to remove the camera—and when he wouldn’t, they’d escort him away or even tackle him.

“I realized, this is the inverse of surveillance,” he said.

Read more:

Raphael Saadiq

Dennis Zilber

[ed.  This gallery is really worth a visit.]

via:

Which Stay, Which Fail

by Anne Hays

The woman who works at Athena, the Greek restaurant two blocks from my apartment, forgets everything. She forgets the specials, so she reads them, stumbling over her words, from the notepad in her pocket. She forgets to bring us water, or silverware. She forgets my girlfriend’s bread, when she orders more, and she forgets to ask if we want desert once we finish. The woman apologizes. She’s older than us—maybe mid-forties. Her dark hair is streaked through with dusty silver (so is mine) and she wears it in a ponytail, waitress-style. She has pale skin, a sharply hooked nose, stringy-long arms. When the woman apologizes we say No! Of course! It’s not a bother! but we both think she’s a terrible waitress, that she won’t last long, and then we think maybe the restaurant itself won’t last long either. It’s new, after all—it’s only been here a few months—and the economy is wretched, after all, and anyway most restaurants fail: this we all know. So many other restaurants have failed, up and down our street, many of which were our favorite restaurants, and when this happens Jill and I think It wasn’t our fault! We were regulars! We tasted the baklava! Every day when we walk down the street we catalog the newly failed restaurants, strange dark holes in our once lit streets, and then murmur to each other about what went wrong. These restaurants—which stay, which fail—are a major source of daily anxiety.

And so when construction began on another new restaurant down the street from our apartment, we felt the excited stirrings of speculative anticipation. What would this empty space, so long a vacant corner store, become? Every time Jill and I passed by, en route to wherever lay beyond, we would muse over the construction and comment casually about the likely new occupant, the way people discuss the gender or name of a friend’s unborn baby. Will they name it Greg, or Allison? Will the baby be cheerful, cranky, spunky, shy, or impossibly stubborn like its mother? The sign they hung up along the brick was classy, almost contemporary, with its pale background, its bold red and black lettering. We were so entranced by the newness of it all that it took an extra moment to register their ludicrous name: The Park Slope Bistro Restaurant Bar & Grill. We wondered: what made them stop at bar, grill, restaurant and bistro and what force of self control held them back from adding the words diner, cafe, boulangerie, speakeasy, and chop house? The establishment’s identity crisis was the first indication of its inevitable doom to failure, but we didn’t want to think about that.

Read more:

BackDormBoys

[ed.  A true classic, and apparently one of the 20 oldest or most-viewed videos on YouTube, or something like that.  It always makes me smile. They should get some kind of royalties or something.]

Wikipedia: BackDormBoys

via:

Failure Notice

216.219.254.203 does not like recipient.
Remote host said: I’m sorry
Unresolvable address: alexj@hottype.com.
Giving up on: 216.219.254.203.

Hi alexj@hottype.com. This is the automated qmail-send program [68.142.199.112], at yahoo.com. I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following address: joan@pja.com. This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn’t work out.
----

216.219.254.203 does not like recipient.
Remote host said: I need to see you.
Unresolvable address: alexj@hottype.com.
Giving up on: 216.219.254.203.

Hi alexj@hottype.com. This is the automated qmail-send program [68.142.199.112], at yahoo.com. I’m afraid I wasn’t able to deliver your message to the following address. joan@pja.com This is a permanent error; I’ve given up. Sorry it didn’t work out. Time to move on.
----

216.219.254.203 does not like recipient.
Remote host said: It doesn’t have to end like this
Unresolvable address: alexj@hottype.com.
Giving up on: 216.219.254.203.

Hi alexj@hottype.com. This is the automated qmail-send program [68.142.199.112], at yahoo.com. I'm afraid I still wasn't able to deliver your message to joan@pja.com. Sorry it didn’t work out. But seriously, alexj@hottype.com, move it along now.
----

216.219.254.203 does not like recipient.
Remote host said: I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. I am lost.
Unresolvable address: alexj@hottype.com.
Giving up on: 216.219.254.203.

Hi alexj@hottype.com. This is the automated qmail-send program [68.142.199.112], at yahoo.com. Again. I’m afraid I wasn’t able to deliver your message. The truth is, joan@pja.com does not want to hear from you right now. She feels free for the first time in years. Last night she did eight shots of Patron and then totally mashed with a hipster dude from Williamsburg who was wearing a kilt. This is a permanent error; I’ve given up. And so has joan@pja.com.
----

216.219.254.203 does not like recipient.
Remote host said: Do you want your copy of The English Patient?
Unresolvable address: alexj@hottype.com.
Giving up on: 216.219.254.203.

Hi alexj@hottype.com. This is the automated qmail-send program [68.142.199.112], at yahoo.com. Okay, so maybe I haven’t been completely upfront with you here. It isn’t just your address that is unresolvable. If only it were that simple. It’s just that joan@pja.com is looking for somebody with certain core attributes. A job, for example. Someone whose bed has made it off the floor. Someone whose life ambition is not just to own a crepe truck. Please try to understand. It’s not you, it’s joan@pja.com. I was unable to deliver your message. This is a permanent error. Sorry it didn’t work out. And no, she doesn’t want her goddamn copy of The English Patient.

Read more:

Avett Brothers

TaskRabbit

 

by Alexia Tsotsis

Genius, as Thomas Edison famously declared, may owe far more to perspiration than to inspiration, but Leah Busque’s revolutionary startup was born in a moment of profound laziness. It was a wintry night in February 2008, when Busque, a 28-year-old engineer at IBM in Cambridge, Massachusetts, realized that she needed dog food for her yellow lab, Kobe. She wanted nothing more than to get someone else to trudge outside in the snow. “I thought, wouldn’t it be nice if there were a place online you could go,” she says. “A site where you could name the price you were willing to pay for any task. There had to be someone in my neighborhood who was willing to get that dog food for what I was willing to pay.”

Inspired, she quit her job four months later and started a company, originally called RunMyErrand, with money from angel investors and an incubator. The site launched in September 2008, and by the following March, its roughly 100 registered “runners” had performed hundreds of tasks. Today the site, since renamed TaskRabbit, has more than 1,500 runners in San Francisco, Boston, Los Angeles, and Orange County fulfilling up to 3,000 tasks per month—everything from assembling IKEA furniture to making a beer run.

Think of TaskRabbit as an eBay for real-world labor. When users, called senders, post a task, they also invisibly declare the maximum amount they’d pay to have it completed. Runners then bid on the task by declaring the minimum amount they would accept. Unlike on eBay, though, senders can choose freely from among the bids, since the reviews and experience levels of runners can vary significantly: Highly rated runners—or those who happen to be available immediately for a rush job—can command significant premiums. Tasks range from courier assignments that can take just a little while to jobs like moving help that can take hours and are often scheduled up to a week in advance. TaskRabbit takes a 12 to 30 percent cut of each transaction; the higher percentages are deducted from lower-value jobs. Customers pay by credit card, and the runner’s share gets deposited into a TaskRabbit account, with checks cut every Friday.

To keep the rabbits scampering, the site employs some serious game mechanics. A leaderboard ranks the top runners, displaying the level that each has achieved and their average customer review. The runners also see a videogame-style progress bar showing the number of additional points they need to jump to the next level. Points are awarded for everything from bidding accurately on a task (15 points for being within 15 percent of the sender’s maximum price) to bidding quickly (15 points for bidding within the task’s first 30 minutes) to emailing friends and urging them to join TaskRabbit (three points per email). The level system is exponential: Moving from level 0 to level 1 takes only 60 points, while going from level 20 to 21 requires adding roughly 1,700 points to your tally. The highest level reached so far is 23, achieved only by a 58-year-old former military officer in San Francisco named Alex K. (All the runners are known by their first name and last initial.)

Read more:

via:

Pat Metheny

[ed.  Another Pat video.  Watching this and other performances the amazing thing is that he doesn't appear to be a particularly fluid player - he really grips that fretboard - but his tone, technique and phrasing are always exquisite.  There's a lot going on beneath those fingertips.]

Char Siu Pork or Ribs

I love the "barbecued" pork and ribs in Chinatown. They have a distinct pork flavor, a glossy sheen that implies the sweet glaze beneath, and a glowing red-pink color that penetrates the surface (that's barbecue pork loin above, not ribs).

Unlike traditional Southern American low and slow smoke roasted barbecue, there is no smoke flavor, even though there is a pink ring beneath the surface of the meat. How do they do it?

Well, it turns out that Char Siu, even though it sounds like charcoal, is not grilled or smoked. It is roasted in a special oven, usually gas fired. And most of the time it gets its ruddy tone from red food coloring (some chefs use a red bean paste, but that's not common). Sigh.

But it still tastes great. You can buy Char Siu sauce in Chinese specialty stores, and it makes a fine glaze, but it doesn't make ribs that taste like Chinese restaurant ribs. That's because you need to marinate the meat first. I've worked on this recipe for a while and I think I've finally nailed the technique for making Chinatown Char Siu Ribs at home in the oven or on the grill. Here's how to do this dizzingly delicious favorite. 

Recipe

Serves. 4
Preparation time: 20 minutes to make the marinade, 3 to 12 hours to marinate
Cooking time. About 90 minutes

The meat
2 slabs of baby back ribs, cut in half lengthwise, or 4 pounds pork loin cut into strips about 1" wide, 1" tall, and 6" long

The marinade
1/2 cup hoisin sauce
1/2 cup brandy (or rum or bourbon)
1/4 cup honey
1/4 cup soy sauce
2 tablespoons toasted sesame oil
2 tablespoons hot sauce such as Tabasco
2 tablespoons powdered ginger
1 tablespoon powdered garlic
1 tablespoon five spice powder
2 tablespoons powdered onion
2 teaspoons red food coloring

The glaze
About 1/4 cup of honey or Char Siu sauce

About the meat. Many Chinese restaurants use spareribs that are chopped into 3-4" riblets with a cleaver. If you want, your butcher can make you riblets with her band saw. If not, you can do them whole. I like baby backs for this recipe because they are a bit meathier.

About the Chinese ingredients. There are no substitutes for hoisin sauce, five spice powder, or sesame oil. They are responsible for most of what we think of as the flavor of Chinese food. Five spice powder is easy to make at home, but the others are not easily made. Click on the links for more info on these ingredients. If you have trouble finding them in your grocery store, try AsianFoodGrocer.com or Amazon.com.

About the hot sauce. If you have an Asian chili sauce you can use it, but any old hot sauce will work fine in this marinade since it provides more heat than flavor.

About the food coloring. Food coloring is necessary for the authentic color. I am told by readers that you can substitute beet root powder for the red food coloring, but I've never tried it.

Serve with. The classic accompaniments are Chinese beer or jasmine tea. If you can find it, try hibiscus tea or Pinot Grigio from Oregon (most of the California Pinot Grigios are borrrrring).

Do this

1) Mix the marinade thoroughly in a bowl. Don't skip the booze. It helps penetrate, and even if you're a teetotaler, don't worry, there isn't any measurable alcohol in the ribs. Yes, I know alcohol can dry meat out, but I just think it works well in this case. If you must skip it, use apple juice or water, but booze is better. You can substitute fresh ginger and garlic for powdered ginger and garlic if you wish.

2) Marinate the meat for at least 3 hours in zipper bags. Overnight is better.

3) As much as I am a fan of outdoor cooking, this meat tastes great cooked in an indoor oven. Either way, heat your grill or oven to about 300°F. If you are grilling, set up in a 2-Zone or Indirect system. Make sure the meat is not directly over the flame on a grill. If necessary, put a pan of water with a rack on top of it under the meat. Roast for about 60 minutes.

4) After about 60 minutes for ribs and about 45 minuted for loin meat, paint one side with a coat of the glaze (honey or Char Siu sauce). Cook for 10 minutes, glaze side up. Turn them over, paint with glaze. Cook another 10 minutes. Remove them, let them sit for 5 minutes, cut ribs into individual bones, and serve. I like to sprinkle them with chopped fresh chives.

via:

Anime Eyes

From Wikipedia:

Many anime and manga characters feature large eyes. Osamu Tezuka, who is believed to have been the first to use this technique, was inspired by the exaggerated features of American cartoon characters such as Betty Boop, Mickey Mouse, and Disney's Bambi.  Tezuka found that large eyes style allowed his characters to show emotions distinctly. When Tezuka began drawing Ribbon no Kishi, the first manga specifically targeted at young girls, Tezuka further exaggerated the size of the characters' eyes. Indeed, through Ribbon no Kishi, Tezuka set a stylistic template that later shōjo artists tended to follow.

Coloring is added to give eyes, particularly to the cornea, some depth. The depth is accomplished by applying variable color shading. Generally, a mixture of a light shade, the tone color, and a dark shade is used. Cultural anthropologist Matt Thorn argues that Japanese animators and audiences do not perceive such stylized eyes as inherently more or less foreign.

via:

Couches in a Pig Barn

by Penelope Trunk

If you ask the Farmer, he would tell you that I was really really nice to him last week while he was in bed, immobile, strung out on six Percocet a day. I made him pies, and French toast, and meat at every meal because there is no amount of Percocet that would make him not want to eat meat.

I watched gunslinger movies with him when he was groggy and I made sure to talk only about innocuous topics like the state of world politics, something that we’d never fight about.

I can’t tell you everything went smoothly. I forgot to let the chickens out a few days. I lost the new bag of Cat Chow and served ground beef for two days of heaven on earth for the cats. And, there were a few times the goats got into the house. But we figured out how to handle everything.

Until the Farmer felt better: His back didn’t hurt so he wanted to work. So, he just stopped taking the Percocet. Cold turkey. And because we live in the country, the doctor gave the Farmer sixty Percocet pills with no instructions for how to go off narcotics.

For those of you who know nothing about Percocet, first of all, if you ever get that many pills prescribed, sell them on the streets of New York City to fund your child’s education. That’s how hard they are to come by.

And there’s a reason: They are highly addictive. I’m linking to some stuff about getting off high dosages of Percocet, but I’m summarizing: You can’t go cold turkey. You have to go slowly or you make yourself crazy.

So the Farmer was crazy and I had to have a drug intervention to tell him he was a total jerk and having withdrawal and he couldn’t tell and he needed to do it more systematically.

I convinced him. But he is not a guy who lays in bed all day. And he had already done it for five days. He wanted to work. On Percocet. I told him we agreed no machinery on Percocet. He told me how it’s not fair that I want him to taper and I want him to not work.

Then we have a screaming match about how life is not fair. That is the first topic. Which slides into:

Me: Don’t scream at me—

The Farmer: No you’re screaming at me—

No. Fuck you.

I told you I don’t like swearing.

I told you I don’t like you being mean.

This did not happen. I mean it did. It has happened so many times that it’s like the bass beat in the background of our everyday life.

So we did that and then he told me he had to work. It was a work emergency.

Here’s what he said: “I have to check cows.”

You might think I know nothing about farming, but I have actually learned a lot precisely for figuring out if the Farmer is BSing me or not.

Me: Your dad can check them.

The Farmer: I don’t want to call him. It’s a masculinity thing.

I swear to God. He said this.

Read more:

"Moon Indigo" by Ellen Granter 
via: