the gizzardly joys of thanksgiving

i cooked a bird.
me, the quasi-veg-head....cooked a bird that i won't even eat.
but i cook a pretty mean bird.

this post is a little late because canadiana thanksgiving was at the beginning of october.
but i was uploading some photos from my camera to the computron and i had forgotten about these photos:













so i decided to cook a bird and trimmings for 13 family members (is that a sign of age? who knows...i just love cooking for people--always have)
to make my conscience feel better, i ordered a free run, grain fed (raised just for the occassion) bird from a local mennonite farm.
this baby, we called her chantelle, was a 20 lb beast. and she still had some pin feathers stuck to her. you see, when the birds aren't massed produced by butterball™, they actually have feathers. and hefty breasts.
the night before the big day, i decided to give chantelle a salty bath.
i was reading all about how to make my bird delicious and read about brining the bird, especially an all natural, non-frozen, non-butterball bird.
so with a mixture of salt water and herbs, i double bagged chantelle and soaked her for 12 hours. unfortunately her wing tip broke a hole in both bags and the kitchen floor was cleaned with a salt water, sage and black peppercorn cleanser
thanksgiving morning i woke up like it was christmas morning...ran to the fridge to get chantelle and prep her for her spa day.
rinsed off the brine, and made my own herb butter.
ever so gently i pulled the skin from her breast and slipped my hand between the two to rub the butter in. then i put some sage leaves under the skin.
it was beautiful.
it was masochistic.
and a bizarre practice for someone who doesn't eat turkey.
but i actually didn't mind. maybe it was the biologist in me?
and it left my hands feeling supple.

so an elephant goes into a black hole...

two fascinating articles and a whole lotta dung

i have never seen so much s**t in my life. honestly.
to spare the gory details, i cared for a client yesterday--progressive ms, quadriplegia, aphasic (doesn't speak)--who had been given a suppository the night before. need i say more?
made me wonder if this is what i got into nursing for.
the RN said "this is nothing".
good lord.

what interested me this week was the idea that you can't have everything.
where dung beetles get compensated, in terms of growth (in this case big horns), other parts suffer (in this case, testicles):

horniest male beetles have tiniest testicles

and this is just sounds like oodles of fun:

working invisibility cloak created at last

cauliflower and avocado

after leaving my pathophysiology class on wednesdays, my brain is starving. plus it's well after lunch time.
today i stopped at my favourite falafel place on the way home, an egyptian eatery on the danforth called the prince of egypt. although similar to lebanese cuisine, they make their falafels with lima beans instead of chick peas. they are the best! and cheap, cheap, cheap.
today i stopped in and was trying to decide on something different. the young guy who runs the place with his father suggested i try his favourite breakfast wrap: battered cauliflower with avocado. sure, why not?
although his father gave me a weird look of inquiry when he relayed the order, i went ahead with it.
while i was waiting, i had a wonderful talk with the son.
right now, muslims are in the midst of ramadan.
adam was telling me how it was hard being in the restaurant business when fasting because he's serving food all the time, smelling the food, and talking with customers, which makes his mouth very dry and parched.
but he really believes in god, and believes that fasting is a very humbling experience. through fasting, muslims can feel the effects of starvation and feel the effects of poverty.
in the many years he has fasted during ramadan, he has never once broken his fast. i found this so impressive because he's a young guy and only human. i can't imagine how hard it would be to refrain from food, drink, tobacco, and unpure thoughts from dawn until sundown.
many hours are spent reading the qur'an and reaffirming your faith in islam.
it was a wonderful conversation and i learned so much.
i was so intrigued i even forgot my wallet, which i didn't realize until a half hour later, when i was trying to purchase some fruit at the market.
i ran back, and as soon as i opened the door, adam smiled and extracted my wallet from his back pocket, while his dad and his friend made jokes that it had taken me so long to come back they had used my amex to make calls to egypt.
and you know, even when i realized my wallet was missing and i remembered how much cash i had in there (i'm a server...i always have cash on me), i wasn't even concerned about it. i knew it was in good and honest hands.
and it was.
and that cauliflower and avocado pita was damn good.

i don't know anything

many people believe wisdom comes with age.

Meacham (a psychologist) believes that wisdom is characteristic of young people because they have more of an open mind; older people know too much and are too stuck in their ways
he thinks that when you can admit that you don't know anything, is when you have attained a certain wisdom, and that this is a completely young perspective...fresh, new thinking.

Eastern thoughts think that knowing you don't know anything does pertain to wisdom, but this transpersonal wisdom can only happen with age. it is only when you are older can you transcend your ego and see the "big picture". this is enlightenment.

i guess it depends how you define wisdom.

(*photo: my friend beebs, transcending his ego and attracting leeches at a hidden waterfall on manitoulin island)

conservatives and counterculture

after a lengthy pause from a great book, The Rebel Sell: why the culture can't be jammed, i've picked it up again for my long subway ride to and from my clinical placement.
just as i'm reading about the difference between dissent and deviance and what's acceptable in public by society's standards, a girl gets on the streetcar, headphones on, singing at the top of her lungs.
which was fine, except she's singing rap lyrics...which would also be fine, except instead of a rhythmic flow she's singing only the ends of sentences that are emphasized.
and emphasized by serious profanity.
it was a funny situation because aside from myself and another adult, there was nobody else on the car. but how funny would it have been if there were children? would she have stopped singing? or did she even notice she was only rapping the emphasized disses and cusses?

so back to this book...
there's this regular at the bar where i work, whom i do like, even though he's admittedly (and proudly) a conservative. he's a very intelligent guy, very sweet too, but we don't have much in common--which inevitably leads to some heated debates which are always abruptly ended.
i think he's given up trying to change my young mind about the evils of the left, and instead our conversations are now only about karate...which is fun, but getting tiresome.
it seems he's simply refused to try and get through to me. which is unfortunate, because i always enjoyed our arguments.
the other night he nonchalantly mentioned how much he likes george w. and everything he stands for.
and in my tiredness, all i could muster was "what?! warmonger." not very intelligent convo, i know. but sometimes i forget just how conservative he really is, and i am rendered speechless.
what i really wanted to say was something along the lines of this:

"...to this day, Republicans in the United States go to almost comical lengths to denounce the enemies of America as "evil." In their minds, they are striking a rhetorical blow against the counterculture, which they believe denies the reality of evil. (As usual, American politics is dominated by the compulsion to refight the battles of the '60s.) What conservatives fail to observe is that this rhetoric directly feeds the countercultural idea that they are so desperate to oppose. "We need to get tough," the conservatives claim. "We need to use force, because our enemies are evil." What they tacitly admit, thereby, is that if their enemies weren't evil, then there would be no need for the use of force. This sets things up for the argument that the enemies in question are not actually evil, they're just misunderstood. And so there is no need for coercion! Thus the conservative backlash feeds the countercultural ideas whose conclusions it tries so hard to oppose." ~ Heath & Potter, 2004, p. 74

time to rest.
my brain is chock full of g-tube feedings, colostomy bags and catheters.

In reality: this is just awesome because i now know all about what this guy discovered.