Deep Dish Pizza

I don't remember my first experience with deep dish pizza.  It just is: a glorious feature of my Chicago life.  I, and my near-bottomless passion for cheese, adore it.  Oh, how I pity the lactose-intolerant!  What a bleak, featureless world they must inhabit!  But, it's not just cheese. The crust. Oh Em Gee, you guys, THE CRUST!  You eat the pizza part with a knife and fork, and when it's done, you then pick up the crust with your fingers and consume its doughy, crunchy, carbohydrate-y deliciousness with appropriate reverence.

It is so good.

My mother hates deep dish pizza.  She also disdains Indian food from Devon street. She's weird.

I was also recently told that deep dish pizza is tourist food.  Let me respond to that claim which, on its surface, struck me as not entirely merit-less. But upon further reflection it is not valid.  Lookit: my favorite building in Chicago is the Sears Tower,  arguably the most touristy place in Chicago. But I love it because you can see it from so far away.  You can see it from miles and miles and miles away, traveling on anonymous highways, and you know you're almost home.  The Sears Tower is home.

Moreover, being touristy doesn't diminish the value of something.  In Florence, I visited The David.  In Rome; the Colosseum.  I've viewed the Seine from atop Eiffel Tower.  The Grand Canyon almost made me consider the existence of God.  All of these things are touristy.  They are also all wonderful.

But if the universe has, in fact, been engineered by a benevolent deity, Chicago style pizza is its highest achievement.

I write this as I await the delivery of a small deep dish from Giordano's: half spinach, half bacon.

......

The pizza has arrived.  It is so so so good.  Life once again makes sense.  May pizza be upon you all.

Trusting Your Instincts (Plus a Random Aside about The Real World)

Miss me?  You know you did!  Following is a blogpost about when it's time to stop being polite and start getting real (remember Heather?  I loved Heather, but I really really loved Julie.  I thought Kevin was kind of a pill, but I saw him recently on Kamau Bell's show and he's grown up adorable and with excellent politics.  Also, Andre.  Yummy. Oh, how I loved that long hair in the early 90s.  And then season two happened and I stopped watching.  Normally I really hate hating on young people, but, goddammit, Season One of the Real World was THE ONLY GOOD ONE and all reality shows of that ilk have sucked since then.  I feel strongly about this.  I'm done now.)

A couple of Halloweens ago, a thirty-something guy came to our door about 9:00ish.  Don answered the door and said, "yes?"  And the guy said, "Uh, you got any chocolate or something?"  And Don said, "Get the fuck out of here," and shut the door in his face.  I was appalled by that and scolded Don for being so rude.

Later, we realized that this guy was robbing people at gunpoint.

So, you know, point Don.

It made me think of this time, many many moons ago, when I was on a mostly empty bus and a guy sat right next to me.  I felt like it was weird, but also that it would be rude to object.  That guy exited the bus with my wallet.  I have endless stories where my fear of seeming rude has battled down my own inclination for self-preservation and I've ended up somehow taken advantage of.  Some of these stories are kind of horrible.

I think it's a woman thing.  I think women are judged more harshly for discourtesy than men. I think women are more burdened by an obligation to accommodate than men.  No one ever walks past a man and demands that he smile; there's not a woman walking the (American?) earth whom that hasn't happened to.

Or, hell,  maybe it's just me. I know I feel it too strongly and it's one of those things I aim to stop with my own daughter.

So, let's flash back to last week.  We were on the Mag Mile waiting for a bus.  I gave a couple of bucks to a homeless guy.  I'm pretty much down with giving whatever loose bills or change I have handy to homeless people because really, why not?  I do not buy into the theory that people are homeless by choice because that is a stupid thing to believe (fun fact: it is also stupid to blame not being rich yourself on people poorer than you.  Spectacularly!).

Later, on the bus and approaching our stop, a guy a few seats ahead of us said, "Ma'am!  MA'AM!  You got seventy cents?"  I think Laney probably expected me to give him a dollar.  But not this time.  This time I trusted my instincts and said, "I don't have any money."  I didn't say it apologetically.  As a matter of fact, while my words may have been "I don't have any money," my tone was a very DonBon-esque "get the fuck away from me."  And he did.

And then he sat next to a sleeping guy.  He tapped him on the shoulder, kind of hard, and said, "Hey man, you miss your stop?"  And then I watched the formerly sleeping guy hand dollar after dollar from his wallet to this guy, all because he felt encroached upon,  threatened, but worried that he might be perceived to have misapprehended the situation.  But all of us: the guy giving the dollars, the guy taking the dollars and the 3-4 people left on the bus all grokked entirely the situation.  Sleeping guy should have trusted his instincts and gone full DonBon: get the fuck away from me.

Teachable moment: I told this to Laney in so many words.  Do not feel obliged to be polite to people who get in your personal space, affect a threatening friendliness and then demand money.  Tell them to get the fuck away from you.  I told her this in so many words because some situations demand those words.

But, this is complicated, right? WWJD (Julie from the Real World, not Jesus.  Jesus would have given away all his money.  Julie had to learn to be more careful).  A distressingly large portion of Americans are arming themselves to the teeth,  terrified of anyone who doesn't fit into a tediously narrow worldview.  This is way more dangerous than getting your wallet lifted on a bus.  And Laney doesn't have a Heather to teach her how to be open without being taken advantage of.  She's going to have to count on us.  And sometimes...

A few months ago, late in the evening (say 10:00ish?) I was out front waiting for Ginger to pee (oh, you guys, the amount of time I spend waiting for Ginger to pee).  A couple of guys were walking down the street - they were late teens or early 20s (I think... I'm in my 40s now and have lost all ability to gauge - everyone under 35 looks 13 to me). They were shirtless, wearing sweatpants hanging low so I could see their boxers.  I started to feel a little nervous but then decided that I am not, by god, going to be a person scared of someone for not wearing a shirt when it's hot (although, it is tacky! I will go to my grave believing that shirtlessness outside of a swimming situation is tacky tacky tacky) and walking down the street. So I steeled myself and pretended I wasn't a little scared.  As they approached, one of them leaned down to scratch Ginger's ears and said to me, "She looks like Shiloh!"

She does look like Shiloh.  I felt like an asshole.

So here's what I'm saying: I want to teach Laney to trust her instincts, unless her instincts are being assholes.  And hopefully we're raising her in a way that her instincts are less likely to be assholes than mine.

Here's hoping anyway.

Alright, Lookit, Mom, Dad? Just Relax

I love Louie CK.  Madly.  I think his show is brilliant and hilarious and heartbreaking and you should all  be watching it.  But, this thing that went around the internet...



Just.... no.  No no no no.  No. Seriously, no.

What the hell is this crazy, blithe assertion that prior to all his technology kids would try on being mean and then decide it didn't feel good?  In what halcyon 50s sit com did Louie CK come of age where kids were only mean the one time?

Let's look back to my childhood, shall we?  I spent a lot of time with my brother and maternal cousins, Alexis and Jason.  I am, to this day, haunted by feelings of exclusions coupled with taunts of "Meg the Rotten Egg!"  It took a few hundred times before they decided that "didn't feel good."  Why?  Because it felt good!  Survival of the fittest works best when you can group together to identify someone as unfit.  That's childhood, motherfucker.

As it turned out, my brother and Alexis and Jason all grew up to be really wonderful people.  They are, each of them, exceptionally kind and sympathetic, and are all disinclined to take joy from someone else's pain (unless that someone else is, I dunno, a huge asshole like Rush Limbaugh or Ann Romney).

Furthermore, when they were kids, it's not like they were uniformly jerky.  Why I remember one time my paternal cousin, Shawn, was visiting and I decided I wanted to exclude her from a sleepover I was having because I felt pretty sure that being mean to her was the best way to guarantee a truly boffo sleepover!   I wasn't just a victim, you guys!  I could asshole it up with the best of 'em?  You know who talked me out of it?  Alexis!  Who was, "rotten egg" taunts aside, a pretty great kid. She sat me down on the porch swing and gently gave me the, "Meg, you're better than this..." talk.   And I was.  And she was.  And Nolan and Jason were.  And we all were.

But these days, it's (ironically?) all over the internet, this mid-life panic that the new technologies are RUINING OUR CHILDREN FOREVER because we didn't have it and our childhoods were PERFECT!

Kind of reminds me of one of my past lives when I was hanging out with my buddy Gutenberg (not Steve) in 1460 and we were just agonizing about how all this easy access to the printed word would rob our children of the deep personal connections we made growing up.

Lame printing press jokes aside, I think that most likely the best way to asshole-proof your kid is by not being an asshole yourself.  Don't scream at the guy who didn't signal before turning right... let it go (that one's for me).  When your husband takes care of getting the city sticker or your wife does the laundry, say "thank you." Smile at your kid.  Say nice things to people around you.  Don't fall into your iPhone and never look up.  Indulge in the assumption of good faith.  And stop indulging in the assumption that the only thing standing between your kid and a hideous, soulless future and is your own Luddism.

The Limitation of Pith

The tenth anniversary of my father's death passed without comment last week. I'm not troubled by my failure to acknowledge it because Dad remains a presence in my life.  He also, with each passing day, becomes less of an absence.  The hole remains, but the place he occupied has grown and grows bigger than the hole he left.

I wonder if that makes sense.

Anyway, here are two things about me: when I was younger, I lurved me some pithy quotes.  When I got married, my wedding favors were meaningful, cute or clever quotes attached to a little bag of candy.  I was super proud of those wedding favors. When we bought our house, I had this idea that I would have a special room of my own that would be covered in meaningful, cute or clever quotes.   Up here in my 40s, though, I'm less partial to pithy quotes and get kind of annoyed by how reductive they are; how bereft of meaning they are outside of context.

Next: part of this whole atheist thing is a fierce commitment to rejecting bullshit.  And while it's easy enough to reject bullshit when it's coming from the likes of Pat Robertson or Tony Perkins, it remains a challenge to reject your own bullshit.  To wit: I think there was a lot of flight-anxiety induced bullshit in my last post. For further examples of some Sophoclean levels of anti-bullshit activists blind to their own bullshit see either the late Christopher Hitchens or the current Penn Jillette.

So, let's go back to ten years ago and the year following and how I comforted myself.  I told myself again and again that as sucky and awful as it was to lose my father so soon, at least we had him.  The joy of having had a father like I did was so much more substantial than the pain of having lost him.

And then I was reading this story about the end of Breaking Bad in Entertainment Weekly (just stay with me here) where Aaron Paul quotes Dr. Suess, "Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened."

And I thought for a moment that my grief-induced bullshit had found its partner in pithy quote.

Except, no.  The comfort I took was bullshit-free. I've had ten years to think about this and I remain convinced. Furthermore, the unfairly maligned pithy quote is perfectly adequate for stuff like the end of Breaking Bad (SOB and also OMFG can't wait), but it doesn't work for the death of a loved one because this is not an either/or proposition. We can cry because it's over and smile because it happened at the same time.  We are complicated people able to feel all the feelings at once.  As a wise woman once said, "Laughter through tears is my favorite emotion!"

______________________

A few months before my father died, he called me. This was weird, since normally I called and talked about life with my mother and then discussed baseball and/or politics with Dad.  But he called to tell me he was worried about me because I hadn't had a baby and he knew I really wanted to have a baby.

You guys all know that I really wanted to have a baby for about six years before I got a baby (I didn't get a baby, I got the Best Goddamn Toddler In the Whole Mothereffing World is what I got).   I'd spent a chunk of those six years convincing myself that everything was OK, that I just needed to keep calm and carry on (retrofitting that one into the aughties), and that I shouldn't burden the people around  me with my anxiety.  But when Dad dialed me up out of the blue to say he was worried about me, it gave me permission to just let loose. I sat on my back porch with the phone at my ear and I cried and cried and cried. To this day I don't know how, from 500 miles away, he knew that I needed permission to grieve and that he was the right guy to grant that permission.

I can smile at the memory of that liberating, unexpected moment of long distance empathy and I can cry knowing that he never got to know the little girl who finally healed those wounds he was giving me permission to acknowledge.

But mostly, I can set my mind to his life more than his death.

There's no pithy quote to sum that up.  But there is poetry.

And there is music:

Just Awful (or maybe not)

I am writing this blogpost from scenic downtown O'Hare, fixing to jet off to merry old England for three days of meetings which I hope will be pleasant and not at all contentions (they will probably be alternately pleasant and contentious... I should bring cookies ((biscuits)) in with me.  The next time I remember that I should bring cookies ((biscuits)) will be after I walk into the building Monday).

I am pretty sure my plane is going to crash before I get there or before I get home.

If my plane does crash, don't take this as an example of my psychic abilities.  There is no such thing as psychic abilities.  There is such a thing as paranoia.  Pretty much every time I leave the house, or the office, or step into the shower, or turn on the toaster I think something is going to kill me.  This is how it is to live in my world.  It is an anxious and ridiculous place.  On the plus side, I finally got "Blurred Lines" out of my head.  Wait... it's back.

You know you want it.... (is that, for real, the rapiest song lyric of all times or what?)

Anyhoo, what with my flying anxiety kicked all up into high gear I wanted to add a nice blogpost.  If my plane does end up in a fiery crash over the Atlantic, I would like my last thoughts here to be nice ones (side note: I drive my car every day, generally spending a good chunk of it over 60 MPH, and never have this kind of anxiety which just serves to underscore how completely ridiculous flying anxiety is).

So here it goes:  I was reading Gawker comments on one of the stories they run about people being Just Awful.  This one was about a neighborhood trying to stop one family from putting ramps on their house for a newly disabled family member due to fears about the ramps making property values go down.  Seriously: just awful awful people.  And one of the commenters wrote this:

I was going to respond to this directly, but then I thought instead that I would write a blogpost in response because surely she'll read it here and feel super special to have been the subject of my Well-ian musings (the preceding thought brought to you by Self-Delusion(c).  Self Delusion(c), keeping bloggers blogging since 2003).

Here's the deal: media is lousy with stories of Just Awful people.  There are endless stories on Gawker and CNN and DailyBeast of people proudly failing at general decency.  We watch Real Housewives and Toddlers and Tiaras and Amish Mafia (Amish Mafia brought to you by No, Just No. This is Not a Real Thing) and an endless parade of reality shows featuring people who Did Not Come Here To Make Friends.  And I think we consume so much of that because it reassures us that we are not Just Awful.  Lookit that asshole!  At least I'm not him.

Which could be taken as a net loss for humanity in general,  But chunk this one through the mind-nuggets: there are a lot more people who are anxious about being awful than there are awful people.   Which I contend might well mean that people are not Just Awful.

What makes it to the internet or the TV machine are stories of people being exceptional; exceptionally awful, or exceptionally wonderful.  But out in the real world, I think you'll find that people, in general, practice basic courtesy unexceptionally.  While we may be more inclined to remember the asshole who cut us off in the traffic than the person who slowed down a little to make room when we turned our blinker on (you do turn your blinker on when you change lanes, right?  People who don't turn their blinkers on when they change lanes are Just Awful), we are probably all of us far more likely to be the latter driver than the former.

When you head out into the world tomorrow or Monday (I strongly endorse staying inside all day on a Sunday), watch the people around you.  Watch how many people exchange a smile or hold a door or indulge one of the thousands of small courtesies we extend to one another.  Remember those instead of that bitch on Real Housewives who snarked at the maid.  Well, that bitch is probably more fun, but don't let her bitchiness overshadow that guy who handed back the five you dropped on your way out of the 7/11. 

It's a pleasant exercise.  And will restore your faith in humanity.  Just pay attention.  For real: most people are not awful. 

Up. Seriously, Always Up

Recently I crowned Louis Gohmert (R-StupidestPartofTexas) as The Platonic Ideal of the Dumb Asshole after he told this TOTALLY TRUE story about some guy buying king crab with food stamps.

In a very exciting turn of events, and after a hard fought battle, I'm declaring a new victor in the Race to Dumbest Asshole in Congress to Rep. Steve King (R-BatshitIowa) for his recent and TOTALLY TRUE claim that for every one child of an illegal immigrant to become a valedictorian there are 100  with "calves the size of cantaloupes" from toting 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.  Fun fact: 75 pounds of marijuana is approximately how much a normal person would need to consume in order to believe this.

An homage to Republican Apocryphal Bullshit that Riles up an Increasingly Resentful and Gullible Base:

So, I heard that Louie Gohmert and Steve King were super into Michelle Bachmann (R-WTF?Minnesota) because she's always voted Hottest and Most Popular GOP Congresswoman  but then Marsha Blackburn(R-CrazyPantsTennessee) totally tried to mean girl Michelle Bachmann because she's soooooo jelly!   So Marsha pretended to be BFF's with Michelle and told her that she should go to Bob Vender Platts' Family Values Prom with the first guy to make #CantaloupeCalves trend on Twitter because she thought, no WAY anyone could do that and then Michelle Bachmann would totally have to go to the Family Values Prom stag (on account of her super gay husband) but then, dammit if Steve King didn't make it happen.  And Steve King and Michelle Bachmann danced all night to Simple Minds or Psychedelic Furs or something.

And... scene.

Do you know why it's OK for me to make fun of Louis Gohmert and Steve King and Michelle Bachmann and Marsha Blackburn (welcome to the Well, Marsha.  I plan on saying LOADS of mean things about you)?  Do ya?

It is OK because these toxic motherfuckers have way more power and influence than I do and have, all of them, decided to use all this power and influence to punch down at the powerless and the poor.

And, much like Sheriff Seth Bullock, I just cannot stand a bully.  

So let us, as the legion (or dozen or so) readers of this shitty blog agree that we will never punch down, will never blame our problems on people who have less and we will also, with great pleasure and flair, have a lot of fun punching up, mocking and exposing the poisonous nastiness of the Gohmerts and the Blackburns because even though most of us think these people are ridiculous (and, dammit, they are ridiculous), they still have more power than you.  So punch up, my readers.  Always up.

Lunch, Again?

On payday Fridays, I take myself out for lunch rather than languishing away in front of the computer eating a sad salad from home.  

Scene: I'm sitting in a corner table by a window at the Merchandise Mart, eating a pretty delicious vegetable gyoza and reading Bossypants (delightful!).  The el rumbled by outside and I looked up because I like that sound.  I saw a man smoking a cigarette on the world's tiniest balcony 10 stories up.  Behind me some people were having conversation in a language I think was some kind of Asian, but could also have been maybe Eastern European... or African.  I have no idea what language it was. And I thought, "I will never not love living here."

Y'all check in with me when I have to start driving Laney to school again and see if I'm still solid on that.

Another observation:  Female Americans between the ages of 16 and 25, it is possible your jean shorts are both too short and too tight.  I'm worried that yeast infections are becoming the new normal for  whole generation.  Go up a size. Your vagina will thank you.

That is all.