Idle and Blessed

Debt. Forgotten debt. This is the way Eula Biss describes the state of whiteness in America in her 2015 article for the New York Times. “When he was 4, my son brought home a library book about the slaves who built the White House. I didn’t tell him that slaves once accounted for more wealth than all the industry in this country combined, or that slaves were, as Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, ‘‘the down payment’’ on this country’s independence, or that freed slaves became, after the Civil War, ‘‘this country’s second mortgage.’’ Nonetheless, my overview of slavery and Jim Crow left my son worried about what it meant to be white, what legacy he had inherited. ‘‘I don’t want to be on this team,’’ he said, with his head in his hands. ‘‘You might be stuck on this team,’’ I told him, ‘‘but you don’t have to play by its rules.’’ Even as I said this, I knew that he would be encouraged, at every juncture in his life, to believe wholeheartedly in the power of his own hard work an...

President Donald J. Trump Inauguration Day, 2017, excerpts : “Americans want great schools for their children, safe neighborhoods for their families, and good jobs for themselves. These are the just and reasonable demands of a righteous public. But for too many of our citizens, a different reality exists: Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge; and the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential. This American carnage stops right here and stops right now… For many decades, we've enriched foreign industry at the expense of American industry; subsidized the armies of other countries while allowing for the very sad depletion of our military; we've defended other nation's borders while ref...

For the past 3 months or so, I’ve been on a low-fodmap diet (weird and hard, google it) and seeing a nutritionist to guide me through the process of getting my IBS food sensitivities under control. Like any drastic lifestyle change, this diet has rocked my world, influenced every eating decision, and taught me so much about myself in the process. This post is not about what I can/can’t eat, don’t worry – but it is about what this journey has been teaching me about life, some important lessons to learn I think, no matter what your food philosophy is. For one, as someone with just an incredibly sensitive stomach (eye roll emoji), I’ve learned to accept that just like all emotions are valid, all feelings of pain and discomfort are valid. The measure of a person is not how perfectly they ate and therefore felt. It’s not how few fodmaps entered their system on a given day. What matters is not my nutritional perfection on this journey but my ability to hold it all, learn from every da...