On kisses:

 You know how there are some things on the internet that you find and say, "Damn, I wish I had thought of this first?" 

A platonic kiss is pretty easy to imagine.  But what about a Socratic kiss?  A Socratic kiss is "really a Platonic kiss, but it's claimed to be the Socratic technique so it'll sound more authoritative; however, compared to most strictly Platonic kisses, Socratic kisses wander around a lot more and cover more ground."  A Cartesian kiss is "a particularly well-planned and coordinated movement: "I think, therefore, I aim." In general, a kiss does not count as Cartesian unless it is applied with enough force to remove all doubt that one has been kissed. (cf. Polar kiss, a more well-rounded movement involving greater nose-to-nose contact, but colder overall.)"  And a Godelian kiss?

A page of pure, unadulterated Awesome.

Mythconceptions

Rainstorm today.  It would have been a thirty minute walk to the town center from my house, vaguely downhill, through forest and development and shopping streets.  But I was happy, because I wore a kneelength green raincoat and had a matching umbrella, because my hair was curling at all angles and squashed only by said umbrella.  There was a tricky bit of navigation along Cascadian Way, because the growth comes up to the road and there are no sidewalks, but once I reached the pedestrian path down to Mill Creek, I was fine.  A gust of wind helped me along, catching under my umbrella and bernouli-ing me up off the street.  You get quite wetter when you're drifting like that.  Walking, the rain only falls down at you, and in today's case, at an angle.  For a Mary Poppins like myself, however, one finds that the rain falls up as well as down, with updrafts and sidedrafts and other third-dimensional surprises.  So I was quite soaked when I draggled into the dentist office for my appointment, and the knees of my jeans creaked with water.

Forty-five minutes of watching Emeril cook scallops and infuse olive oil, I was turned out with a verdict sans cavities.  And it was back out into the fray. 

It wasn't cold, but raining hard and windy, and I encountered every traditional pedestrian hazard imaginably.  People stared at me through shop windows.  Every vehicle that passed was a truck of some sort, for work on the development between my house and Mill Creek, and I received the mandatory puddle-shower.   After awhile, it made no sense to keep a lookout for deep puddles (everything was at least a little bit underwater) because they made no difference to how wet I was.  I budgeted forty minutes for the walk, and a good thing, as I hadn't calculated for a rather strong headwind.  I didn't pay a lot of attention to the walk down, for my mind was focused on not being late (they charge outrageously) and on taking long and efficient strides.

Holding an umbrella in the wind is an art, and there was a curvy bit between the buildings and the trees where the wind wasn't blocked at all.  I was daydreaming about who I might be, walking about mysteriously in the rain on a Monday morning, when a gust turned my umbrella inside out.  It was very glamorous.

At some point, I started laughing, because there was no one to see me laugh.  And singing, because even in the development everybody was at work or at school.  And in the boardwalk through the woods I realized that my thinking was quite incorrect on a matter.  The woods in winter are not brown and gray and green.  They are red, primarily.  The dense decidious growth loses all its foliage, and in the rain the stems all turn a sharp maroon, so that there is a burgundy haze above the ground.  Above this haze is the gray mist of fir trunks, and all of the green is just like painted-on enamel.  Blue-green enamel for lichen, and spatters of shiny yellow green blobs that are ferns.   I hadn't seen it before.

Then one side of the road was development and the other was the wooded ravine, and it was a moment, you know?  The development side with rich suburban homes that looked exactly how you expect them to look, catalogue and movie homes, and then the trees with their caddywhompus color scheme.  I was very pleased. 


And since no one is home except me and Marley, I changed out of my soaked jeans and into my black velvet-ish skirt, and played pretend that I was a witch (on holiday) with Marley as my hell-hound familiar.  And I made espresso, and read The Once and Future King, because I'm sure witches do these things when they are not out witching things.  Especially Seattle witches who have just tamed the elements.  You know.

Band-aid Vegetarianism (but mostly pork)

I'm considering inventing a new kind of vegetarianism, for myself.  I'm calling it, "Band-aid Vegetarianism."  Why?  I like vegetables okay, but I rarely think to myself, "Man, I could really go for some broccoli right now."  Actually, I do, but it's more along the lines of snap peas and artichokes for me.  And while I have a moral problem with the animals' quality of life in factory farms, I'm okay with raising animals to kill and eat in general.  I wouldn't want to do the killing myself, no, but if I had to kill to eat, I'm sure I would learn to be fine with it.  Occasionally.  I might hunt down all the vulnerable potato plants in the area first.

But not all meat is raised on traditional farms.  There are, it seems, "farms" that conform to this particular business model.  The article discusses a pork factory company in the southeastern United States that produces so much and such volatile waste that people fall in pools of chemical pig manure and die.  That's beside the enormous environmental damage.  In my mind, this is obviously an immoral use of land and animal, and causes more harm than fair. 

Smithfield estimates that its total sales will reach $11.4 billion this year. So prodigious is its fecal waste, however, that if the company treated its effluvia as big-city governments do -- even if it came marginally close to that standard -- it would lose money. So many of its contractors allow great volumes of waste to run out of their slope-floored barns and sit blithely in the open, untreated, where the elements break it down and gravity pulls it into groundwater and river systems. Although the company proclaims a culture of environmental responsibility, ostentatious pollution is a linchpin of Smithfield's business model.

A lot of pig shit is one thing; a lot of highly toxic pig shit is another. The excrement of Smithfield hogs is hardly even pig shit: On a continuum of pollutants, it is probably closer to radioactive waste than to organic manure.

It's an interesting article if you're feeling morbid.  Unconscionable to even dream of supporting of this monstrosity by chance, and beside the issue, livestock is a pretty inefficient way of feeding the human body.  The animals we eat need resources to support them, plus the food that the animals eat requires resources of its own.  And we sit on top of this ginormous inefficiency pyramid!  Well, if I want people to take me seriously, I mean, as an economics major, I can't let myself be tarred by that kind of inefficient... thing.   And  as for my Environmental Studies concentration, well, that goes without saying.  Vegetarianism of some kind might very well be crucial to my sense of proper scholarship.    I'm going to ignore the business minor for now. 

The problem is, I rather like meat.  In my mind, chicken is a kind of palette for gastronomic creativity, and red meat is just delicious.  But what if I just ate them for special occasions, or when I'm at home?  Thus, band-aid vegetarianism.

Lucky for my conscience, I hate pork.  Joseph Luter III, chairman of Smithfield, mentions, "Most vegetarians I know are neurotic."  I wonder if maybe it is impossible for anyone with a heightened social conscience to look at the world and not be a little neurotic?