pasta all'amatriciana, margaret atwood, women vs the feminine, 47's morality, brief scenes in writing, my photographs
yesterday i was grateful for pasta amatritciana...
today i am looking forward to meeting with my colleagues at the cemetery...
i made the most delicious pasta with amatriciana sauce... the recipe calls for bucatini, which i have done in the past and it is an excellent pasta for this dish, but we have been using banza pasta in our pasta dishes to reduce the starchy carbs and increase our protein intake a bit... italian cuisine at its best uses a few simple ingredients of the highest and freshest quality available and through patience and technique turns them into the most delicious of dishes... one important secret for any pasta with a sauce is to finish the pasta in the sauce... my wife and i both agreed that last night's iteration of this dish was exceptional... the sauce takes an hour to cook, but it is worth the wait and easy to get it going...
i read a review of margaret atwood's new autobiography this morning and she was quoted addressing the idea that girls and women are necessarily "sugar and spice, and all things nice"...
No True Believer - by Randy Boyagoda - The Bulwark
She also observes, based on her personal experiences with a childhood frenemy, that “Anyone who thinks that females are perfect, that girls are nicer, that every sadistic thing girls and women do is the fault of ‘the patriarchy,’ has either forgotten a lot or never been a nine-year-old girl at school. . . . Grown men can be as Machiavellian as nine-year-old girls, but boys haven’t quite learned how.”
as i have likely written before, i used to think that getting an abundance of women into positions of power would solve a lot of our problems... like many people, i believed that women were necessarily communal, loving, nurturing and kind... i believed women in power would lead with these qualities when empowered... and then along came marjorie taylor green and lauren bobert and kristy noem... i also read bell hooks... bell hooks maintained that women who sought and achieved power from within the patriarchy would execute the patriarchal paradigm... bell hooks taught me the feminine is a general quality that is not directly tied to the sex of an individual... the feminine does encompass the communal, the loving, the nurturing and the kindness that any human being is capable of... i realized that what i deeply desired was that the feminine, understood as these qualities of being, should be given a place in the structure of our society at least equal to that of the masculine... yinyang philosophy postulates a masculine/feminine continuum and predicts bad results should one or the other become too dominant... we are in that place and only a rebalancing of the masculine and feminine will get us out of it...
in heather cox richardson this morning...
And Trump told New York Times reporters David E. Sanger, Tyler Pager, Katie Rogers, and Zolan Kanno-Youngs that as commander-in-chief, he has only one limit on his power: “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” He claimed he gets to determine what is legal under international law, and seemed to stretch that authority to domestic affairs, too, saying that he was already considering getting around a possible decision by the Supreme Court that his tariffs were unconstitutional by simply calling them licensing fees and that he could invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy troops in the U.S. if he “felt the need to do it.”
this is one of the most frightening utterances from 47 i have read... what morality is he talking about?... he has none... ergo... there is, in his mind, no restraint to his power...
a couple of brief scenes from my walk rendered in words...
an aging white pickup truck, jacked high above its wheels, rust spots scattered like age spots on the hands of the elderly, speeds across the intersection... for a moment i am in the midst of a made for tv thriller and this little scene foreshadows ominously... was some right wing fascist scoundrel the driver?...
and...
i dress up to go for my walk and coffee in the morning... sometimes... when i am more dolled up than usual... when i am wearing my favorite pair of ankle boots... i feel like a sex worker looking for one last client before i go home to bed...
some photos from this morning
