island time

Click here to see the whole set of pictures from our trip.

Stories, as always, to follow.

cmere you little... ATCHOO

There were two evil demons on our flight home yesterday and no, I don't watch too much Buffy. One was this little hellion scream-demon in the shape of a three year old child which, if you're counting, is way too old to still be excused from SCREAMING THE ENTIRE FLIGHT, and by the way? In case you feel like sympathizing with him? Had a MULLET.

The second was this Englishman who just set his entire nation back about two billion points for being the rudest human being I have ever wanted to poison slowly with bleach - his pile of electronics which spilled into the aisle actually tripped a moderately old lady flat on her face and all he grunted was "jeez, SORRY" when everyone gasped with concern, as he went back to his movie. He also stretched out to sleep over both his wife AND child, as they lay trapped in their seats under his bulk.

I tell you this by way of blaming both the Hellion and the Asshole for the cold I got on the plane. The terrible no-good screaming-throat snotty-nose cold that's knocked me for six and people, I don't GET sick. I had to call in sick this morning which broke my hard-working little heart (ahem) because nothing looks more sketchy than calling in sick the day after a vacation, but I figure once I tell them about Hellion and the Beast they'll forgive me.

Oh, and England was great, thanks.

bugger this for a lark, the 2006 edition

We're off to the Isle of Wight today. I keep referring to it as "going home to England" because it's Stuart's home and in a way, it feels like mine, too - or one of them. My gorgeous gracious mother-in-law is celebrating a birthday and we'll be there to celebrate it with her, in the garden with friends and barbeque and wine.

I find it amusing that we're skipping London entirely this time. On the way in, we get a ride from the always brilliant Dave from Heathrow down to Southampton where we catch the ferry to the island. On the way back, we're riding the rails to the home of the darling Uborkites to spend our last night with them, before catching a coach from Reading to Heathrow. Skipping London completely! This is unthinkable to 20-year-old me, who adored London and couldn't really see the merit of visiting the rest of England. Now, I feel like I've seen enough of London and love visiting England for the people - and the peace and quiet of the relative country.

I didn't do a packing spreadsheet this time, but I did write down notes about what I was taking and our suitcase is meticulously packed on the floor of our bedroom. Tickets and passports and documents galore are all ready, as is a ziploc bag full of cables and chargers. Last time, there were so many petit disasters surrounding the trip:

1. Have BA international flights canceled because of strike at Heathrow, fly Newark-Detroit-Amsterdam-UK with 2 hours notice to be at the airport in Newark.
2. Stupidly nearly lose Most Important Document Ever, cause mayhem and heartache to everyone around us, mostly my dad who was on the receiving end of some very panicked UK-US cell phone calls from the Portsmouth ferry terminal.
3. Okay, that's only 2 petit disasters but damn, they were big enough.

This time, I'm determined that everything within my control (I'm looking at you, AIRPLANE) will be under control. We're packed well, we're organized well, we've printed out everything we need, and we're going to travel in style, not chaos.

So off we go to England. I am, as they say, chuffed. See you darlings when I land stateside again.

an infinite number of infinite possibilities for error

Blame it on the fact that I'm reading Isaac Asimov at the moment, but I have a theory stuck in my head. Bear with me since I'm not a sciencebrain, but there was something in there about how you can either have one Universe or infinite Universes, but it doesn't make sense to have two. If you have two, there must be an infinite amount, because any other finite number is ridiculous.

Which is why I'm going insane. We're on deadline here at work and we've been catching stupid mistakes all week, exponentially more frequent the more stressed and tired we all are. So I started reading a circ (magazine-speak for a circulated copy of a story we're working on) and caught exactly one mistake - a missing "e" at the end of "the. Easy enough.

Then for a lark, I read it again, paying special attention to the captions on the product images. Then I caught another mistake, an "a" where one did not belong.

Then I read it standing UP, because I was convinced a change of venue would help. I caught another one - "deskop" instead of "desktop".

This is when Asimov's Universes occurred to me.

So I read it three more times, and caught two more mistakes.

According to Asimov, I could read it for infinity and catch an infinite amount of mistakes. With an infinite amount of monkeys. And eventually, the story on imaging essentials would turn into Hamlet.

So I handed the circ back to my boss and threw my hands up and let the chips (and the infinite mistakes and the monkeys flinging infinite amounts of poo around) fall where they may.

Asimov is great, but Dad and Stuart are speeding over the Queensboro, two shining knights to sweep me away from work, and they're going to take me for hamburgers and then to Rhode Island. So I'm throwing in the towel, giving up the ghost, and other expressions as well. Take THAT, Isaac.

wondering

Can anyone think of a reason that my upper left eyelid would be twitching every couple hours for the past few days?

Is this, like, an impending sign of doom? Do I need more protein? Am I transmitting radio signals? Is Tom Cruisazy out to get me?

Anybody?

adventures in the new

Last Friday, I tried plain yoghurt. Don't laugh, but I've never tried it before. I'd always assumed I wouldn't like it, that it'd be too milky. But sweetened yoghurt gets tiresome and doesn't taste natural, so I'd pretty much given up on liking yoghurt or making it a part of my diet (diet in the sense of food intake).

However, I've been reading this book for fun and inspiration - it's been languishing on my bookshelf since the Bryant Park Book Fair last fall and I'd never cracked the spine. I'm enjoying the book immensely; not just the advice (which is basically my mother's and my grandmother's same set of principles) but also the recipes and the exhortions to try new things.

Guiliano goes on and on about the miraculous properties of yoghurt and how completely essential it is for a healthy balanced life so I decided to throw in the towel and try it. I bought Dannon All Natural even though she encourages making your own (okay, lady, you come over and make my yoghurt from scratch) and surprise! I liked it! I enjoyed it! It was smooth and easy for me to nibble at for twenty minutes while I started my morning's work and before I knew it, I was licking the last of it off the spoon.

So I branched out a little bit and bought some Fage Total at my Greek market on Saturday, while I was doing a big weekend shop for dinner. I had it for breakfast on Sunday morning and, okay, my little tower of adventurous pride nearly fell down. I desperately want to like the famed delicious Greek stuff. But even in 2%, it was really - strong. And - ... milky. So I had half of it, handing the rest over to Stuart and determined to try again later. And this morning, even though my yoghurt was Dannon again, I like to think of it as slow and steady progress.

And did I tell you about the leeks? No? I made my grandmother's delicious vegetable soup on Saturday night, with pork chops and apple-celery sauce. Grandma was Belgian so the soup is typical European soup - vegetables cooked in water (I cook mine in chicken broth because I like the extra brothy taste) with herbs. But I decided to step it up a notch from onions and potatoes and carrots - so I added leeks. I've never had leek. And I loved it. It zinged the other veggies and played nicely with the dashes of thyme and bay leaves. It was pureed to perfection and the heartiest, loveliest, lightest soup I've ever made. I was in heaven. And there were leeks there!

And last night, at Stonehome Wine Bar, I even tried two new cheeses - Manchego and Robiola - and loved them both heartily (lord, Manchego with a quince preserve, is there anything better). This comes weeks after trying Midnight Moon (a goat, no less) at Barrie's and adoring it with a fiery passion.

Between the leeks, the yoghurt, and last night's cheese, if you're counting, that's three new adventures for this week. I'm keeping my eye open for what I should try next. Asparagus? Artichokes? Squash? Cabbage? What's in season and delicious? You should know now that my ambitions are sky-high - by this time next year, I expect to have exactly one type of fish I really enjoy.

Wheeee!

meanwhile ...

I figured it was getting too thought-provoking around here so in honor of my best friend's birthday this past Wednesday, I'm going to tell you a funny story: when Erin was in college, she had awesome roommate who was just a smidge OCD and one of the things she most hated was loose hairs. Specifically, she hated how Erin would, in the shower, just sort of stick loose hairs - you know how you get hairs on your fingers after shampooing your hair - to the tiled walls of the shower.

After the roommate revealed this distaste, Erin (and now we're geting to the part where you understand how incredibly deeply and reverently I love this woman) took to spelling words like HELLO with her loose hairs on the tiled shower walls.

Every single time I'm in the shower, I think of this story and laugh out loud. I hope you do, too.

misconceptions

A few months ago, I came across a photograph at work. It was taken by Lauren Greenfield, a photographer for the VII agency. It was a portrait of a young woman, about my age, standing outdoors with verdant green grounds behind her. She wore a tank top and light blue drawstring pants, and her hair was straight and dark brown, hanging down around her shoulders. She was thin, with prominent collarbones and a flat belly and long neck.

I remember noticing it for several days, pinned to our edit wall as part of a layout, and thinking, "ahh, I wish I was that thin". Now, let me put something in perspective for you - I will never look like that girl, nor did I imagine I might even with the most diligent exercise and diet in the world. I am curvy and short, she is tall and lean. So it wasn't any kind of direct envy. It was more a passing realization, like I do so many times on the streets around me, that this person was thinner than me and I wish I was thinner.

Imagine my own shock and consternation when I realized that of course, the photograph featured in Greenfield's spread was promoting her new body of work - Thin. A book and documentary about - you guessed it - eating disorders and obsession with thinness. In fact, without the book in front of me it's only a guess but I'm willing to hazard that those light blue pants were actually scrubs, and that my dream girl was actually at a clinic for rehabilitation from eating disorders.

So I'd been staring at a picture of an anorexic girl thinking she looked good, wishing I had an approximation of her figure. She was sick, and many women in her predicament are dying, but I was unable to see it for what it was.

Perhaps, if you're a man, you need a few minutes to let the enormous sickness of that sink in. You women, you already understand. Most of you are all too familiar with how horrifically we women can get our visual perceptions into such a twisted frame of mind as to imagine an anorexic woman as a symbol of envy.

I don't want an eating disorder. In fact, I could say with some confidence that it's unlikely I'll ever develop one. This isn't to say I'm any better than these women but there's been no sign or behavior in even my darkest moments where that kind of illness could take root. And I am thankful for that. But it makes what happened even worse. It means that even with a relatively healthy frame of mind, I am still so self-critical as to see a girl so thin she's killing herself and think, "yeah, that's sexy".

It was a jarring moment for me. If the lens of self-criticism over my eyes swerved so badly in that direction, it also means what I'm seeing in the mirror is tainted with a funny-house effect. So I've made an effort, even while I struggle with the right diet and exercise, to stop being so harsh on myself. Because the harsher I get, the more divorced from reality my eyes become.

And this is coming from someone who's still relatively healthy about her image. I can only imagine how many other women are reacting to the messages of thinness around us. I know that, for me, every single time I've seen a girl as thin as Greenfield's photograph, I've forced myself to stop and think about whether it's healthy - not just for her, but for me. We have to stop doing this to ourselves. I have to stop doing this to myself. Illness isn't sexy, and thinness doesn't need to be universal.

I wish we knew this better, we women who are so bright and full of life and energy and who spend too much negative energy agonizing about our bodies instead of positive energy improving them - and our minds, too, which is more important. I hope I will learn.

it takes a village

I'm really disturbed by the scandal surrounding Kaavya Viswanathan, the Harvard novelist whose debut novel with passages plagiarized from Megan McCafferty's two novels.

First of all, I'm disturbed that she has consistently explained the plagiarism - which, exampled here, are extensive - as "unintentional", and a result of her "photographic memory" and the profound impact that McCafferty's novels had on her. Even Katie Couric, the queen of (at least well-played, if insincere) Nice, couldn't help taking a dig at that last week, by asking if she really expected anyone to believe the "unintentional" excuse. I certainly don't. I see that explanation as a "that's my story and I'm sticking to it" response. When I was little, I used to lie under duress about something, like a broken toy or a forgotten homework assignment by bending my own role in the situation. No, I didn't ignore my homework! I forgot it! That toy fell off the shelf, I didn't drop it!

It was an instinctively protective reaction and I've seen tons of children do it - give a little truth (the toy did break under my supervision, I knew I had homework) and bend it to make the outcome more favorable (it wasn't my fault, I just forgot). It's a compromise-lie.

And that's what I suspect Ms. Viswanathan of doing. She compromise-lied. It fit with her original reaction to The Crimson, which was "I don't know what you're talking about". It has nice words and explanations, like "internalizing" and "profound effect". I just don't think it's true. It probably doesn't matter, since her publishers have pulled the book from the shelves, ostensibly for the offending passages to be rewritten but I suspect LB would like nothing more than to forget the book completely. But it matters to me, because I can't get this compromise-lie out from under my irritated skin.

Admit it, I want to say. Admit that you remembered the successful use of those passages, characters, plot concepts from McCafferty's book and under the pressure of being 17 years old with a book-packaging company and an agent, you took them because you panicked. Because this is what bothers me the most about this story - how it happened.

Ms. Viswanathan was pushing to get into Harvard, and her family hired a consultant at IvyWise to help achieve that. The consultant saw her writing and put her in touch with an agent. The agent saw her writing and dropped her off with Alloy Entertainment, a book-packaging company that helped "shape" her "novel". And then, instead of the darker, more complex book she'd originally imagined, she created a somewhat fluffy-but-relevant coming-of-age book about - you guessed it - an overachieving Indian-American girl trying to get into Harvard. And then, surprise, Little, Brown bought it.

And we're surprised that she lifted from another novel? We're surprised that the pressure and convenience of all aspects of Ms. Viswanathan's chosen path led her to accomplish her goal at whatever cost?

This is what bothers me the most - well, almost as much as her compromise-lie. She was given an enormous amount of pressure and responsibility with very little of the attendant maturity and experience, so she did something profoundly stupid. She's to blame - but who else is?

What about her editors, the team of whom admitted to a great role in "shaping" the novel? What about the agent who saw the potential in a very young client, and sent her to a book-packaging company instead of spending the time and effort to cultivate her as a client for two or even five years, to see what else she created? What about Little, Brown, who may have been extra-super interested in the debut novel from an intelligent minority? What about her parents?

Ultimately, it's her fault. She put her fingers to those keys and typed out those words and whether she had McCafferty's books physically in front of her keyboard or not, there's no way she didn't know exactly what she was lifting. And she should and will feel the consequences. But aren't other people responsible, too? Normally, I hate playing the blame-distribution game, but I feel like it's merited here. Even now, who is advising Ms. Viswanathan to continue the ridiculous "unintentional" explanation? This seems to me an even sadder and more complicated tale that simply an author abusing the ethical code of originality. Ms. Viswanathan's failings are hers, but are they really hers alone?