I guess I will dare to go out on a limb, here, and say that as a super male model, Ash Stymest must represent something quite different from what we ordinarily expect. I really do like him, but the question is why? I don't think he is particularly good-looking; he is young and all, but compared with some others such as Paddy Mitchell or Luke Worrall, or let's really be unfair and throw in somebody like Francisco Lachowski, guys who are "swoon down on your knees WOW", I don't think Ash Stymest has the same effect. He doesn't have a really great body. Yes, he is at least lean, very lean, but if he has any muscles at all it is because he plays around and is hyper-active, skateboarding, dancing, or just plain won't sit still. But I doubt he has touched a weight or entered a gym, which means there's no conscious effort toward his body, he just sort of has this natural body that is sexy and appealing for no discernable reason other than he just doesn't worry about it, but instead enjoys it without concern.
One of course notices his tattoos (maybe with like, maybe with dislike), but on the whole, those are more of a distortion to the body than an enhancement, I think. I do LOVE the way he says "tattoo," though; I wish I could write it in the International Phonetic Alphabet, but the way he says it is a kind of a lightly skimming over something like "taddauw" but said so appealingly that it almost makes ME want to get one too (and that's saying the nearly impossible). I think tattoos would be truly wonderful if you could walk up to a person with them and ask him about them. I mean, really LOOK at them and get their story, not quickly glance away as if the person were badly crippled or had a horrible disfiguring disease. Maybe Ash Stymest is a person with tattoos that make him look dangerous and tough, and yet you aren't afraid of him.
And honestly, as much as he is photographed, are they ever having him wear any kind of clothes that you would actually wear (although you maybe kind of wish you COULD wear, but only he can and you can't)? This means that you are yearning toward a world he lives in, and you can, when you realize that he seems to making it up himself as he goes along (I think he would be the first one to say this). If he can, you can.
I also imagine that he is kind of unhealthy (although of course I could be wrong, he could be almost Mormon in his pristine personal habits for all I really know), smoking, drinking, taking risks, there are probably drugs in there somewhere, all of which means that he could be eventually wearing out in a painful way, youth doesn't remain immune forever. But then, if so, he's also living in a world you are curious about but don't want to subject yourself to the danger of. So you watch him, instead, and enjoy its reflection.
I think what it is, is that he is a nuclear ball of energy. You never know what he is going to do, and probably neither does he, but he'll do it anyway and that lack of inhibition is powerfully magnetic. I don't think we could possibly stand him for long as lover or even a friend (we're not up to it), he would wear us out or send us screaming to the quiet comfort of a padded cell, but we would like to PLUG INTO him for a moment, but the most we could stand is what we get from a photograph or a video, a three-minute experience, or a two-dimensional one. The full-on experience of Ash Stymest in person would probably burn us out as if we touched a live power line. Does anybody know, does he have a boyfriend or a girlfriend, or are all his human contacts like balls rolling around in a pinball machine, good for a quick bump, but then they've got to skitter away (or he does)? If he has some loved one, I'd love to see what they look like. I imagine hair as frizzy as a Troll doll and if you touched THEM, you'd jump back from the electric spark as if you had spent the last half hour shuffling along a thick carpet (whereas they're the one who has all the residual energy).
In short, what Ash Stymest shows is that you don't have to be beautiful in any tradition that anybody knows, you don't need to work out, groom yourself, count your calories, live in crippling moderation, worry about a future you have no control over, or follow anybody's irrelevant rules. You only need to be yourself without inhibition, regret, fear, social approval, or higher authority. How wonderful it is that a person who seems totally free can be a super model (that is, a representative for others), and that may be Ash Stymest's greatest power, that he is dissident and dissidence is exactly what we need, all of us, even those in power.
First of all, I am sick of it being called an "oil spill". It is not a "spill", it is a "leak" or a "spew" or a "gusher" or an "out of control uncapped oil well"; to constantly call it a "spill" is to harken back to the Exxon Valdez and other accidents wherein certain legal precedents were set, but this is a different situation entirely and needs to be looked at with fresh, unbiased eyes. (And using the right words instead of common "sound bites" is always being on the side of truth instead of manipulation.)
Second, I am sick of everybody saying "BP did this," and "BP did that". BP is a huge corporation (a legal creation on paper, actually), comprised of hundreds of employees, including board members, officers, managers, clerks, and every other type of occupation. What caused the explosion was a combination of decisions made by INDIVIDUAL workers on the job. It was a DRILLING SUPERVISOR who decided that chunks of rubber coming up out of the riser (which ended up being pieces of a damaged rubber ring that is one of three stopper methods used to temporarily cap off the well) weren't a problem enough to delay the operation, an operation that already had cost BP close to 30 million dollars, I think it was, in losses due to problems and delays in the drilling of the well (leasing the Deepwater Horizon costs a million dollars a day). Secondly, it was a BP MANAGER (again, an individual person) who overrode the Deepwater Horizon's method of filling the well with "mud" (a thick, heavy liquid substance which has weight that applies downward pressure to counteract the upward pressure of any gas or oil that seeks to escape from a well), which was the second of three capping-off methods, in the interest of making it more convenient and quick for the extraction platform that was going to come in afterwards (Deepwater Horizon is a drilling platform; after they drill, they cap off the well and move on to drill elsewhere while another platform comes to connect with the well and pump out the oil). So now we have two individuals making time and cost-saving decisions that compromised the safety of the operation and effectively eliminated two out of the three methods used to safely close off a well. The third method is the concrete cores that Halliburton installed. I do not have much information on that piece, except that I did hear that some manager at BP counteracted Haliburton's procedure in some way which compromised that, as well (used fewer cores, maybe, to plug up the well?). To hear how this whole thing is being treated, it was as if the Board of Directors themselves issued a policy of "safety features be damned, full speed ahead," you know, due to "greed" and all that, when really, again, it was individual workers on the scene making risky (and wrong) decisions, which can, and does, happen any and everywhere (such as the railroad engineer in Southern California who was text messaging just before having a head-on collision with another train). Perhaps BP "policy" can be blamed for putting on that pressure to hurry? But who has a job where THAT doesn't exist? (Why have I been putting in 12-hour work days for the past four months? Fortunately, I just work at a school instead of drilling the deepest underwater oil well in human history.)
This is NO DIFFERENT from the Challenger space shuttle explosion, where engineers warned that due to unseasonably cold temperatures in Florida that the rubber in the O-rings might have been compromised, but management at NASA refused to delay the launch due to fear of bad public relations and damage to their carefully drawn-out schedule (a delay in launch probably also costs money). This was a decision to "chance it", since they really didn't KNOW what the o-rings would, or would not do. The drilling supervisor on the Deepwater Horizon didn't actually KNOW that the annular ring was totally damaged, nor did the BP Manager KNOW that the pressure from the well would be too great to contain the methane gas without the weight of the "mud"; these men only knew that many millions of dollars had been "wasted" already and they wanted to hurry up and get this well capped off so that the pumping rig could then move in (maybe in a few hours?) and start extracting this oil.
I don't remember there being cries that NASA ought to be drawn and quartered because of this managerial decision to launch the space shuttle against engineering recommendations to not launch. Why? Because NASA is the GOVERNMENT whereas BP is a corporation; to liberals, GOVERNMENT is supposed to be the solution to these problems, yet always, it is individual working people who make the decisions whether they are working for the government or for a corporation. So, the very force that liberals want to use to regulate errors such as made by individuals working for a corporation (BP), were the actual forces that caused the Space Shuttle explosion (workers for NASA). So, increased government control is not the answer. Deepwater Horizon had the best safety record of any drilling facility out there (seven years without an injury or accident), yet the risk-taking decisions of a small handful of workers in a moment counteracted that great safety record and caused the greatest ecological disaster in history. But this is not "BP". It is a laborer for Deepwater Horizon and a mid-level manager for BP. It could be someone like us in some other setting.
"Corny" as it may seem, I feel like saying to all those screaming congressmen and liberals and environmentalists, "Let he who has never been involved in an accident or made a bad decision throw the first stone." Everybody else is just working to satisfy their agenda, which is to "destroy the petroleum industry" and "increase government control over all aspects of life." Sounds good to some level of idealist, but I see they're all still driving cars....
I will probably be vilified for my comments here, but I care about the environment just as much as anybody else does and I detest what happened and mourn the loss of life in whatever form it comes in, and I can't stand the thought of beautiful white Gulf beaches turned gray. But my grief over this situation does not make me succumb to regular "ten-minute sessions of hate" as if I lived in Oceania in 1984. My whole orientation is more "what exactly happened, what can we do to make sure it never happens again, and what can we do now that it HAS happened?" (This, of course, will never happen with a government commission, such as the one that Obama has already assembled of environmentalists and others who have already said that their agenda is to socialize the energy industry.) Looking to find who to blame and brand them as "evil" (members of the Board of Directors?) and spend all our time screaming at them and thinking of ways to punish them is simply medieval and really, not of much practical use to anybody.
I'm turning over a new leaf concerning my involvement on the Internet (although sometimes I feel that I am turning over so many new leaves that it is eternally autumn) and although it is a simple and almost childish thing, I am putting it down here in writing for my own benefit in hopes that I continue to follow it.
Virtually all correspondence on the Internet is anonymous and the truth is that we may be temporarily contacting a type of person that we would never willingly stand within 100 feet of in real life. I think of being on the Internet as somewhat similar to riding a Los Angeles Metro Bus, which I sometimes did, for example, when my car was in the shop. But riding a Metro bus is to be packed jostling body-to-body for a horrendous, extremely uncomfortable hour, hour and a half commute with people you just might not want to ever associate with for even a moment, let alone having your entire body pressed tightly against them for an eternity. So now whenever my car is in the shop, I rent a car.
I want to apply an "escape" similar to that regarding my use of the Internet, and this particularly pertains to forums, discussions, comments, and book and movie reviews within which I might participate. It is nearly impossible to read a list of comments on any subject without coming away from the experience being thoroughly revolted by some of the participants--"Who are these people?" and "Keep them away from me, please!"
In the several years that I have been extensively participating on the Internet, I have NEVER EVER seen a person change his point of view during a discussion. There is absolutely no learning, no compromises, no coming together of minds, no progress at all, just an ever-increasing spiral of filth and spittle. It's all about you extending an opinion to an anonymous stranger and then him spitting in your face something vile in response, not only disagreeing with your opinion, but also casting aspersions against your character. What's the point of it, really? If what I was interested in was cock fights, then where you would find me would be in some seedy part of town putting my money on some poor razor-blade-legged rooster. Since that's about as far from my personality as anything I can imagine, what am I doing wasting my time discussing things on the Internet with people who are, in my opinion (as far as the type of people I would willingly associate with), just as objectionable?
So I'm simply not going to do it anymore. Oh yes, I will still leave comments, reviews, my opinion, and I will also carry on a discussion with somebody worth discussing things with, but regarding this other type of person, I will simply ignore them. This is a hard thing for me to do, and in the past, I have been far too easily drawn into further escalating discussions until I can't stand the involvement any more. This has been very stupid of me, but I have learned from the experience and it is now at an end.
One of my favorite people of all time was American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. In his day, he was a controversial figure (and actually still is) as many highly creative and innovative people are and he was forced to receive a lifetime of bile from other architects, critics, and various other people who just didn't understand. He was interviewed by Mike Wallace in a series of television programs and one of the questions Wallace asked him was what did he think about or do about this kind of person. And I loved his answer so much that I would like to see it carved into stone: "They don't matter. I realize that I am not for them, and they are not for me." And that ended the matter. Why should this man be interrupted in his progress by stepping into a pile of dog do? He'd just wipe his feet and move on. I absolutely love that attitude.
I mean, I know I am "old" and "out of touch" and all, but don't you think that if you were young:
and considered good-looking enough to be a model (though in this picture I'm not too keen on the farmer tan):
that you would do whatever you could to preserve your looks, and not have a freakin' FACE tattooed on your chest?
After all these years, I still just don't get it. But it really doesn't matter, does it, this guy is STILL a model anyway. Like those models who look like heroin addicts. I am beginning to think that on some level (have I ever said this before?), this kind of advertising is similar to those liquor ads that had carefully airbrushed into the ice cubes monsters that severe alcoholics sometimes see when they have delirium tremens, selling a product by appealing to Freud's id, the lowest level of each individual's psyche (unconscious, instinctive, and relentless in pursuit of its basest desires). It's frightening how so many things are actually an addiction. But as for me, I'll draw the line at addiction to needles, which in my view, is what we are really seeing in the picture above. Watch how on him, now that he is started, those tattoos will spread like a fungus.
My all-time favorite way to entertain is to have one special someone or a special couple over for a semi-formal, sit-down, candelabra-lit dining-room dinner for which I have cooked and prepared everything from cocktails and hors d'oeurves all the way through every course (including carefully selected wine served in cut crystal goblets) up to and including dessert and after-dinner drinks, preferably following a particular theme. (It's especially nice if that special someone stays over and then I cook them breakfast in the morning; such a breakfast can be just about anything, but in my view, has to at least include waffles).
But I haven't been able to do that for oh-so-long, especially being in this apartment in which there isn't room for even me to eat. I have to eat at my desk, which I think is disgusting.
But nobody I know seems to entertain that way any more, anyway. Instead, it's all pot-luck parties. I used to despise pot-luck, which you will understand is the opposite polarity from the kind of entertaining I just described that I like doing, everything being organized and integrated, instead it is a hodge-podge of whatever it is that people decide to make (if anything), which almost always has to be something that can be made ahead and then travels well which isn't really the best of dining. I think my mother used to dislike potlucks, as well, because she saw them as a cop-out for the hostess (since my mother was the most awesome dinner-party-giver ever), but she didn't dislike them as much as she disliked cocktail parties, which she saw as something people gave as en masse paybacks for all the wonderful real dinner parties they had been invited to. I don't think my parents ever in their life gave a cocktail party; instead, they had friends over, two or three couples at a time (not the hundreds who come to drop in at cocktail parties), for some real food and awesome conversation and deep, mature companionship. As a child, I loved experiencing from afar this very adult entertainment; the delicious aromas of the food, the tinkling of the bar ware, the joyful laughter of the ladies, and the earnest discussions of the men. They made me eager to grow up into the mysterious and serious world of the adult.
But potlucks are the only kind of parties anymore, so I do go to them and I always bring a main dish that I made (and something different each time I go, since I like to explore, although there was a group of vegans I partied with when I lived elsewhere who would always beg me to bring my textured vegetable protein tamales, so for them I always made those...and tamales you can make ahead and they travel well, in fact, they are a perfect picnic food. I'll never forget the tamales I bought on the Copper Canyon Railroad that runs from Los Mochis to Chihuahua in Mexico. Women would board the train carrying buckets filled with tamales covered with a hot dish cloth and walk up and down the aisles of the train selling them until the next station, when they would get off and another bunch would get on in their place and in this way hop-scotching station by station all the way up the line. Unbelievably delicious and quite safe to eat.). I don't really understand these people who happily get away with bringing "nothing", and by that I mean a bag of chips and maybe some dip, or a six-pack of beer, or napkins and paper cups. Gee whiz, how hard is it to cook something? Even the most pathetic of bachelors ought to learn how to cook at least his special spaghetti or an omelette or maybe a chocolate pie.
Speaking of chocolate pie, when I was so sick with the stomach flu or maybe it was something else a couple of weeks ago, I reverted back to feeling like I was a five-year-old (I wanted my Mommy!) and I began to crave certain foods that I remembered enjoying way back then that I don't think I have had since I was five. For example, I was craving Jello and also Jello Instant Pudding. As I started to eat again after three days of expelling toxins from both ends, the first thing I made was (lime) Jello, because I just happened to have some in the house that somebody gave me a couple of years ago. And then when I was strong enough to go to the store, I bought some chocolate and some vanilla Jello Instant Pudding. I also bought other things I was craving, such as peanut butter and grape jelly for PBJ sandwiches, and tiny bags of plain potato chips (not Fritos, Cheetos, Doritos, or any other "os" that I normally might select now). I got Root Beer and Seven-Up (which is hard to find...it's always Sprite everywhere) and apple sauce. Then, being a little more adult but still self-indulgent, I also bought Carrs Table Wafer crackers and Alouette artichoke and asparagus cheese spread.
I was invited to a party a few days later (pot luck) and WAS going to make some kind of a main dish, but happened to treat myself to some Alouette and crackers and inside the Alouette wrapper was a recipe for cheese-stuffed mushroom caps that looked delicious. So on a whim I made those, instead, and nothing could be easier. You wash the mushrooms, gently pull the stem stubs out of the caps, fill the caps with 1T of Alouette spreadable cheese each, put them on a cookie sheet cap-side down, sprinkle on each 1t of seasoned bread crumbs and cook in the oven at 375 degrees for 15 minutes. The whole thing was so easy that I made them at work and cooked them in the oven in the employee kitchen right before the party, which was right after work. And people loved them. One woman who is a phenomenal cook asked me for the recipe and she made them herself for a party she went to two days later.
Tonight I made myself chocolate-flavor Jello Instant Pudding...I kid you not, this takes FIVE MINUTES and I can't imagine who would complain about the flavor. Call it "Silken Chocolate Mousse" if you want. They had a recipe for what would have to be a killer pot luck dessert: Chocolate Jello Instant Pudding stirred with Cool Whip and poured into a pre-made Oreo pie crust. WHO CAN'T DO THIS? Now, if you want to be really fancy, you can grind up some peppermint candy and mix it into the chocolate pudding--great for Christmas.
While I love making dishes that take quite a lot of time (and maybe skill), I absolutely do not complain about using plain old American foods that I loved when I was five years old that can be put together to make something that will bring tears to the eyes of any adult. We all need comfort, don't we? And the other guests will be thrilled and impressed, whereas you bringing the six-pack or the bag of chips, not so much.
It ended up that yesterday, Thursday, was just about all about eating. Now, given the fact that yesterday was Thanksgiving, anyone reading this might nod his or her head knowingly, thinking, "Well of course, it was Thanksgiving." But no, yesterday wasn't my Thanksgiving; that will be tomorrow, Saturday, which ends up fitting everybody's schedule better. Is it incorrect to celebrate Thanksgiving on a day other than Thanksgiving Thursday? I am sure that when we do celebrate it, I will be thinking that it is about getting together with family and friends and being thankful for our many blessings...and THEN eating.
I started the day yesterday with breakfast at Cafe Lombard, after making sure that they were open (which they weren't the night before). This is the delicious little Italian restaurant that is owned by a Chinese woman who does all the great cooking; she serves regular American breakfasts and lunches. When she saw me, she said, "Welcome home!" after recognizing me from when I was here at this time last year. I loved that "home" (as opposed to, say, "nice to see you back again"). I asked her what she was going to be doing for Thanksgiving, open for Thanksgiving, or cooking at home for family and friends, but she said she was invited to a friend's house so she was able to escape the kitchen. I said, "Ah ha, this time it is for somebody to be treating YOU."
For some reason, this year I am being thankful of all the time off that I get to have in my job and am more keenly aware than ever of all those who are working to make the holidays work for those who are off. I've been leaving larger tips on such occasions, and also making mention of my noticing that they ARE working whenever that seems appropriate. I think it must be hard to be working when everybody else is playing, but a little extra recognition might make it better.
I got to sit in "my" seat in the restaurant's window (which will now be the fourth time I have sat in that one and only spot there). Kind of behind me were the only other diners in the restaurant, a man and a woman, whom I never really got a good look at because to do so would involve a very obvious and pointed turn-around-and-look. Whenever I am dining out alone (which is about 99% of the time), I am keenly aware of how easily I can hear every single thing that is said by others nearby, which I assume is a general principle with all lone diners unless they are utterly insensitive to whatever surrounds them. But I make a big point of acting like I am paying absolutely no attention whatsoever (and sometimes whatever they are talking about is of no possible interest to me), but my ears are not turned off so people's conversation are similar to a radio that is on in the car. I just want people to understand that if you are talking in a restaurant and there is a lone diner nearby, every thing you are saying is being heard by that diner. Does this now make you paranoid? Well, it shouldn't...but I thought you would like to know.
What makes it hard is if one of the speakers is outrageously funny, or perhaps extremely fascinating; I want so much to laugh, or to join in, but either response would spoil the carefully created illusion that people have some measure of privacy when out in public.
Based on their conversational style, I happened to like both of these diners sitting behind me at Cafe Lombard, even though the man had a very whiny voice. I wondered deeply about that whine; it wasn't that he was complaining about anything or was even demonstrating very much of a negative nature, but it seemed that this voice might be a carry-over from a childhood raised in a household where the culture was one of extreme disappointment and while he had absorbed that affect, he counteracted it by having an attitude of "the silver lining." Another description of this might a Pollyanna-ish "glad game," which is a perception of always turning around the bad things that happen to see what good is really inside there. I find that unfortunately people are more commonly the opposite of that, keenly aware of or carefully seeking out the negative that is lying in wait inside of the good things that happen. So, in some peculiar way, I realized that despite what might ultimately become screamingly tiresome to others, this voice could be described as the "sincere voice of Thanksgiving," saying in its tone, "I may have been hurt all my life, but there is always something good to be thankful for." So his was the perfect soundtrack for Thanksgiving morning.
The woman, on the other hand, was quite free-spirited, taking whatever in life came her way, and often made a clever joke of her companion's "glad game". For example, the man was quite complementary about various things about the restaurant...he loved the light classical music that was playing in the background, he loved the crispness of the home fried potatoes, his eggs, though a little runny for his taste, were nevertheless quite delicious in a way that he wouldn't have expected. He said to her, "So I had thought you might like to eat here instead of the coffee shop in our hotel, even though it was an eight block walk, I hope that was okay." She said, "It was fortunate that I had put on my walking shoes."
When the owner came to bring the man some more coffee, he said, "Oh yes, PLEASE, this coffee is just SO good!" Then he leaned over to his companion and said, "But you are drinking tea." And she said, "They have the best hot water here." I nearly burst out laughing when she made that comment, but he took her humor in stride and said, "You know, you are in so much trouble!" which, when spoken in his Eeyore-like voice, also nearly made me burst out laughing.
After breakfast, my mission was to cross over the bay via the Golden Gate Bridge and drive around in Tiburon and Belvedere, two of the more famously appealing across-the-bay waterside communities that I used to love when I lived in the area. Both of them, along with the better-known Sausalito, and well, anything water-side in the bay area, is utterly out my reach, I who couldn't even afford a falling-down tract house in a gang-infested area of L.A. But for some reason that I cannot quite yet explain, it was important for me to reconnect with this kind of thing, as if they represented some life-line that I could grab onto to pull me up out of the mire that I felt stuck in.
After marveling at those fairy-tale communities (and SOME people actually commute via ferry-boat from those lovely Marin County docks to San Francisco's downtown financial center skyscrapers, so I could just as easily refer to them as "ferry-tale" communities), I crossed back over the bridge and headed south into San Mateo County to go look at the restored Carolands Chateau in Hillsborough: Carolands, the 65,000 square foot home of Harriet Pullman Caroland, heiress of the Pullman railroad car fortune, once sat at the top of a major peninsular estate in what is now the Town of Hillsborough, which I loved to go look at from time to when when I lived in the area, but as people died and various heirs took over and money became tight, the place fell into disrepair. It used to be you could actually drive right up to the house and, if you were brave, walk around on the property, but now I see that it is fully landscaped again, gated and closed, and all but-invisible from the road.
Hillsborough, and another similar town in the Peninsula, Atherton (where my parents lived from when I was in sixth grade all the way through to when I was in my mid-thirties), are as equally out of reach for me and 99.9% of all the other Californians as are the fabled bayside cities, but I have fond memories of these communities having lived there during my "prime" years, so they are in my blood. This makes me kind of the opposite of the whiny-voiced man having breakfast at Cafe Lombard. I did not grow up in an atmosphere of disappointment, but in one filled with nearly impossible expectation.
I hadn't slept well the night before and felt exhausted with doing even more driving the day after having made the long drive up here, so I decided to drive back to San Francisco to take a nap and then relax until time for my dinner reservation at Bobo's, which really ends up being the day's main event.
I found Bobo's (Boboquivari's) to be everything it was touted to be. The restaurant, itself, was a melange of different rooms on different levels all in a fun, dark, romantic atmosphere. I was seated at a table in a room that was partitioned into intimate areas by heavy velvet curtains. There was an array of various-sized heavily-framed artwork on the walls, all in a hodgepodge of DISarray, as if the joyful energy of the various diners over the years had knocked them hopelessly off-kilter. I thought that was decorating genius. The colors and patterns of the Harlequin, the Italian comedic/operatic clown (such the rows of diamonds, or black and white stripes), was also a decorative theme of the restaurant, and a little research on the subject revealed that harlequins, while gluttonous, were also acrobatic, given to flips and cartwheels. Well, I will surely agree with the GLUTTONOUS part, but if after eating there I even attempted a cartwheel, that would have been the last act of my sixty-one years of life.
The waitress wished me a happy Thanksgiving and I said, "So, what about YOU?" and she told me that the restaurant had provided a Thanksgiving party for all of them earlier that day, which I thought was a wonderful touch. "But how are you going to be working stuffed and sleepy?" I asked her, and she laughed, saying that she had had time for a nap and now was subsisting on gallons of espresso. But we both agreed that sometimes your co-workers are more of a family than your own family, so a Thanksgiving with them can make sense.
My exposition here wouldn't be complete without a summary of the other diners who were in this room whose conversations, of course, I was privy to. Next to me were two men, a young college-age man with a phenomenally deep and sexy voice, and an older man. Naturally I wondered about why those two would happen to be together on Thanksgiving night, but I ended up figuring out that they were father and son, and surmised that the father had divorced his son's mother long ago and really doesn't know his son all that well. One was visiting the other, but I couldn't quite figure out which one lived there and which one didn't, but if I had to guess, I would have said that it was the father who was from out of town. The son seemed more secure whereas the father was unsure of himself. They discussed the ISSUE of religion, God, and what happens after you die (but not any of the specifics), which I guess came up because the father is an atheist whereas the boy was raised by his mother to be a church-goer. However, once the boy reached college-age, he determined that Christian behavior was hypocritical and therefore he lost faith in the faith. It was kind of a peculiar conversation, actually, in that the father never had had a thing to provide on this subject and now that his son was questioning, the father couldn't add anything to it, since to him there is nothing there to even ask about. For his part, the son wondered how a person actually went about answering these questions, realizing that most people never really do seek, but simply accept whatever they were taught.
At the other table in the room were three drunk middle-aged men and one fat middle-aged woman. They were simply having a good time eating and spent their whole meal discussing the relative merits of various steakhouses and how steaks are best cooked. It was their conclusion that Bobos' was consistently the best steakhouse they knew, and that Ruth Chris's was often a disappointment and ALWAYS snobby (and horribly expensive). After their dinner, they were going to further add to their fun by bar-hopping for the rest of the evening.
As for me, I really treated myself to the full nine yards--mixed drink, the bread that they automatically brought, salad, steak, side, dessert, and coffee. In retrospect, I would have been perfectly happy with just a steak and maybe a simple dinner salad.
Regarding drinks, the menu offered a variety of clever creations, most of which seemed to involve margarita-like salt around the rim (which, if I get a margarita, I always ask the bartender to skip) except here there were various combinations of salt and pepper, or various other spices, or even ground chocolate. I ordered a blueberry margarita that various restaurant reviewers recommended except that the only blueberry I managed to taste wee the actual blueberries that they had placed IN the drink. This margarita had nothing around the rim. Well, it was unusual and refreshing, but I didn't need to have it.
The bread they brought was practically a whole LOAF of olive bread that was heavily infused with olive oil so that one did not need to, say, put on butter (besides, there was going to be BUTTER to come elsewhere in the meal....). The bread was the only thing I was unable to finish, so I "brought the rest of it home" to the hotel and actually, I have yet to finish it. It's very good and also very filling, but somehow I sense that it is very healthy. It has pieces of both green and black olives in it.
The salad was a wedge of baby romaine lettuce with sliced apples, seasoned walnuts, and raspberry dressing. I told the waitress that I could get addicted to those seasoned walnuts. She told me that they also serve them as snacks at the bar and she, herself, always finds herself reaching for them.
Then came the steak, a bone-in filet mignon cooked medium rare, sitting in the middle of a large square plate, and the "side," which was sauteed portofino mushrooms. Here was where the butter came in, since both the steak and the mushrooms had been cooked in butter.
I could very well say that this was the most delicious steak I had ever had. I, for sure, could say that it was the most TENDER steak I had ever had. In fact, upon alternating between a bite of steak and a bite of some portofino mushrooms, they both were as equally tender. Since for me steak is often a chew-chew-chew ordeal, I just can't imagine how they managed to cook it so deliciously and so tenderly. For sure it has to do with the cut of meat, but it is more than just that. Anyway, that was utterly wonderful and would bring anyone to his knees, I am sure.
For dessert I had blood orange sorbet in a waffle basket and this was actually a dessert that did not taste sweet; the blood orange is almost bitter like a grapefruit. I kind of enjoyed having a dessert that did not make me feel like I had to immediately brush my teeth after. And, in all honesty, I am getting so that I hate chocolate, so it was nice to have a dessert choice that didn't have anything to do with chocolate.
The coffee was, of course, also delicious, but what I liked about it was the sculpture of the coffee cup in which the porcelain rectangle that was brought around to make the round sides of the cup had one end of it that was also extended out to form a handle. And they didn't just bring you a cup of coffee, but it came in a stainless steel carafe for the table that held three or four cups.
So, after this meal (which, before the tip cost $108), I had no further ambition than going back across the street to the hotel and lying down for the rest of the evening, which is exactly what I did.
But finally I could fully understand the suggested diet of one of my doctors. His trick, as he so proudly reveals, is "soup for lunch, salad for dinner, and steak once a week". That "steak once a week" makes him wink at you, as if THIS is the key to dieting success. But that secret hadn't communicated to me until my dinner yesterday at Bobo's. NOW I understand the reward that is implied by the "you can suffer anything all week just so long as you get a steak" steak.
And a diet is for sure something I need to go on again.
One of my favorite lines in literature was from To Kill A Mockingbird, in which Harper Lee describes Mr. Ewell, the man who lived at the junkyard, who in the story, unjustly accuses a black man of raping his daughter (which line I approximate here): “The only thing which allows Mr. Ewell to hold his head high is that if you scrub his skin really hard, deep down underneath all that dirt, that skin is white.” I grew up understanding that if the ONLY thing you can feel proud of is that your skin is white (and, by extension, if you feel proud of that fact at all), then you don’t have anything to be proud of. The color of ones skin is a given fact, not a personal achievement.
Nowadays, I apply that same principle to people who vilify fat people. Fat people are the only people in our society left whom haters still feel they can publicly hate with impunity. These same haters probably typically still also hate various other races, religions, or cultures, but, being conformists and therefore cowards, they are too afraid to be public about it. But about the obese, they just won’t shut up, but instead, expect praise and amens for the vocalizations of their prejudice.
With obesity, they can have a field day, because their deep-down sense of inferiority requires that they accept and further the myth that fat people are fat because they are lazy gluttons (which the hater feels that he or she, at least, is not), and therefore are actually deserving of such vilification; their condition is something that they brought upon themselves.
But, just like we all know that homophobes are closet homosexuals (sexually secure men and women aren’t the least bit concerned about what other adults consent to do in bed, they’re too busy enjoying their OWN relationships and are glad that others can have them, too, regardless of whatever it is that floats their boat; true love is a force that multiplies, doesn’t divide), so too, those who so vocally hate and fear the obese are harboring some intractable sense of resonance with the condition. In other words, deep down inside, what you really fear is what you fear you really are.
Now, I don’t mean that those who want to ostracize, outlaw, tax, punish, hide, exclude, ban, imprison, or exterminate the obese (or simply get off on writing negative articles about them) fear that they, themselves, are “really” fat (although in some way they may be way too obsessed over their own appearance and secretly fear that some “but the Emperor is wearing no clothes”-saying kind of a person will spill the beans on them by pointing out how really very ugly they are). Usually, they have no specific relationship to fat at all, but are, instead, those who can and do eat anything imaginable without the slightest fear that they will gain an ounce. They are people who have no weight problem, but somehow imagine that this is because they have worked at it and have therefore achieved this condition (whereas everybody else is some kind of out of control glutton), yet in actuality it is no more praiseworthy than the color of their skin.
What it is that they really fear, is the concept that some shameful, hidden desire or hunger within themselves is one that will someday rise, grow and out-picture itself on their body for all the world to see. What they fear is that some evil vice, thought, or obsession will become public knowledge, and in their mind, the only reason this hasn’t come out yet is that they have held onto it with a vice-grip of self-control. They fear that if they would ever let go for a second, they would then send out into the world an unstoppable torrent of vileness, much in the same way that they view adipose tissue overwhelming the carrying capacity of the human body. This is, perhaps, akin to the grieving male who is terrified of crying, because if he ever dared to let go and express or release his grief, his tears would be enough to drown the world. The female version of that is a fear to give in to anger; for to do so might be the explosive release of a whole pandora’s box of destructive ills onto the world. To people like this, the obese are an abomination, because in their mythological view, they are examples of people who have let go, and in the lives of the obese haters, such letting go would mean the annihilation of their illusory lives. So, to them, the obese somehow MUST BE STOPPED.
But this is not what obesity in the real world (the world beyond the fantasies of the lean) is about at all. Obesity is but one of countless examples of a single affect caused by a myriad of reasons, many of which are still unknown. To blame all obesity on a single combination of two causes, eating too much and exercising too little, is not only incorrect and unobservant, it is actually insanely wrong, and every overweight person KNOWS this, whereas it seems that NO non-overweight person imagines anything else. And how unseemly of a situation is this: countless non-overweight people who know NOTHING about this condition, arrogantly lording it over and advising overweight people with principles that the overweight people absolutely know are false (or at least misleading, or only a tiny part of the story). Why should people open their mouths at all on a subject they know nothing about, or when whatever it is that they know is wrong? This would be like me lecturing physics to Richard Feynman, arguing philosophy with Lao Tsu, or telling Michael Jordon how to play basketball.
Well, what else could be the causes of or contributing factors to obesity? Unhealthy food, toxic food, food laden with chemicals the body has no idea how to process (substances that didn’t exist millions of years ago), emotional stresses bathing the cells with cortisol or other hormones causing imbalances that cascade into various maladies such as insensitivities or burn-out of insulin, leptin, adrenaline, or other hormones that now no longer can carry regulatory messages that the body can act upon, reproductive cycles that stimulate the storage of fat, bad or diminished sleeping habits that confuse the natural processes of the body, feelings of insecurity or lack of safety (actual or imagined) for which the body knows only one solution that was appropriate in ancient times, to put on pounds for warmth or cushioning or greater size, or for protection; eating too few calories (dieting) that leads to a signal of famine and therefore a food storage response, too much exercise that is over-stressful to the body and therefore worsens the internal chemical imbalances, false dietary information promulgated by the government or food corporations, or by people who have always been lean and therefore know nothing whatsoever about the process of weight loss, unproven genetically modified foods, anti-biotic, growth-hormoned, estrogenated feed lot protein sources, rancid oils, mercury in fish, vitamin shortages, damaged immune responses, damaged liver, gall bladder, badly functioning intestines, toxins in the colon, pharmaceutical side effects effecting massive weight gain…is this enough to give you the idea? And combine these causes with all the mis- and dis-information on how to lose the excess weight once it is gained. I have at this point seen every single kind of food blamed for the problem in some diet plan or another, going beyond the usual culprits of sugar, white flour, and certain fats, to even include ordinarily-considered benign or essential substances such as certain vegetables, fruits, and even water (yes, I even found a diet plan that was against drinking water). And for all I know, there may actually be some truth to these various complaints. So what is an overweight person to do? It’s probably easier for them just to give up trying to fix this condition and try to live with their body condition, particularly considering the fact that the impulse to eat is fundamental (you could almost just as easily make yourself breathe less), especially when a person is starving, and if an overweight person is unwittingly consuming non-nutritious food (or food substances that the body doesn’t need at that particular time), then no matter how much they eat, they are still starving and therefore the impulse to eat cannot be stopped.
I have become disturbed by seeing this ignorant viciousness toward the suffering obese happening more and more now that people are being emboldened by the possibilities of socialized medicine. Now no longer is it “they might make me sick if I see them on the beach” (this is a subset of the very weak characteristic of “Oh, I am so offended”), or “they’re going to be sitting next to me on the airplane”; now it’s “they’re going to unfairly raise our social costs of medicine”, or maybe even (from the greens who crave population diminishment, which can only be described as a yearning for genocide) “they’re going to eat up all the food in an economy of shortages…and I’m going to need that food to power my car!”
Well, to be disgusted by the sight of fat people on the beach, one may as well claim revulsion at babies born with cleft palates, or to be repulsed by paraplegia, or horrified by acne. Life, unfortunately, is loaded with misfortune and bodies are scathed. What, it’s all a matter of aesthetics then? You find fat bodies “distasteful”? Sorry, but few Americans can justifiably lay claim to that; we’re not Parisians, after all, or even Masai warriors, for that matter.
You fear an unpleasant seat neighbor on an airplane? That could be somebody undeodorized, or a boor who won’t stop talking, or a couple of unruly, undisciplined kids, or scores of other circumstances. Life, venturing outside your own living room, is filled with any kind of unpleasantness. If you’re that worried about who’s going to be sitting next to you on a plane, maybe you ought to fly first class…or secure a private compartment on Amtrak. Sure, YOU have to pay more, but YOU are the one with the problem with life not being nice enough for you.
Regarding the cost of medical care, maybe you ought to not lend your support to socialized medicine; there are far more reasons to not want that than the presence of fat people in society. Maybe you are also suggesting the elimination of a much worse drain on medicine, the elderly? Which would include YOU when you get older, of course.
While all this has been around for quite some time, it now seems to be amped up more than ever, with very shrill people screaming very loudly and very frequently. Suddenly, other people’s obesity is being considered a national problem (instead of an individual problem, which is what it is). All this came to a head for me where I finally had to write about it, because there is a blogger that I used to enjoy and admire, Karen De Coster, who writes for various libertarian causes. I liked her, because she seemed to understand economics and the principles of personal freedom. For quite some time, it was refreshing to hear her sensible and personally empowering point of view; I would have said that Thomas Jefferson and Ralph Waldo Emerson (what we think we know of them, anyway), to name only two out of many, would have loved her and welcomed her voice in our present times when so many people have given up self-control in favor of the nanny state. I thought we needed writers like Karen De Coster to counteract the soporifics emanating from mainstream globalist media.
But to be successful and genuine in this arena is to walk a razor’s edge, and bloggers have to be careful, because they offer much greater opportunity for dissection than do columnists writing by the column inch, or broadcasters speaking in sound bites. Sooner or later, the more a blogger writes, the more his or her warts will come clear to the public eye, and this is all the more obvious in the case of those bloggers who attempt to put forth the illusion that they are perfect, all-knowing beings pontificating for the benefit of an imperfect, ignorant public, which is Karen De Coster to a “T”. As a blogger, I’m safe from that, myself, because I have always been up front about my confusions, questions, and attempts at moving forward from my place of error and brokenness. If my thoughts seem strange (or just plain “wrong”) to people, as they almost always do, it is because the ordinarily accepted realities (group-think illusions) do not need to be spread by me—I am speaking from an entirely different, alien, and possibly brand-new (or seldom spoken) position, but one which I think takes us closer to the truth. (And when my direction ends up being wrong, I am quite clear about being willing to alter my view and my direction.)
Libertarians have successfully been branded selfish and uncompassionate by liberals, as also have conservatives and Republicans (President Bush thought that he could stand out and garner liberal votes by claiming to be a “compassionate conservative,” thereby underscoring that conservatives were normally NOT compassionate). This is because the libertarian end of the spectrum supports the inalienable right of private property and absolute personal freedom of behavior up to the threshold that nothing is done that steals from or interferes with or hurts the rights of others. A tax that raises money for a welfare program, for example, is for government power to steal private property from one group of people for the benefit of another group of people. Libertarians view this as wrong, but liberals ask, “What, you don’t want to help your fellow citizen? Are you not your brother’s keeper?” Libertarians are not against helping their fellow citizens when they are the ones voluntarily deciding to do it; it’s the being forced to by another group that is the problem. But for liberals, “helping their fellow man” is an easy sell, especially to those who will be the recipients of this aid (under the determination and control of the liberal elites). This is the “progressive” way, which has been accepted by the majority voter as the “caring” and “evolved” way to run a society, despite the fact that it is ultimately destructive both to the producers from whom all this largess is taken, and to the recipients (some would say “parasites”) who, while gaining some level of subsistence, nevertheless lose their initiative and self-reliance, often for generations.
Unfortunately, the blogger Karen De Coster has demonstrated that she actually IS as uncompassionate as any liberal would accuse her of being, and in actuality she doesn’t agree with libertarian principles at all. In fact, in typical LIBERAL fashion, she only wants freedom for herself and for others who completely agree with her, but she would deny that freedom to others whom she thinks are somehow distasteful, but who may be anything but, and she would deny that freedom to those who support those others whose freedom she denies. (This is pointed out by the fact that she moderates the comments that are left on her site, and I know from personal experience that she will delete comments that conflict with her position. I consider that cowardly, especially for one who thinks she is such a "female stud", and for one who espouses freedom, hypocritical. How can you say you espouse freedom when you manipulate a one-sided discussion, and particularly when the point of view you eliminate is the one that actually presents the truth? This indicates that you have an agenda and therefore your blog does nothing but add to the disinformation stream, which makes it not worth reading...not worth it for me, anyway.)
She recently wrote a negative blog decrying fat people riding motorized wheelchair scooters at Walmart. To hear her description of it, Walmart is inundated by hordes of fat people traveling the aisles, people “too lazy to walk” and utterly without shame. This is something that for some reason bothers her very much…I guess because she sees it as yet another sign of our society’s diminishment into a state of chosen helplessness in which these “lazy obese” will require, demand, and expect help from others, which presumably includes Karen De Coster’s personal treasury.
But there is much amiss here in this complaint.
First of all, just because an obese person CAN walk does not mean that they are lazy when they do not. Our whole society is one that, when offered the opportunity to do so, will most often choose a machine to assist us with our labor. After all, we generally drive our cars to the store, park as close as we can, and go up and down stairs via escalator or elevator. We will also use a washing machine for our clothes instead of taking them down to a river so that we can beat them on a rock. If we are to write a letter, we more often than not will chose to do that writing on a computer rather than getting out clay tablets for cuneiform. If we mow a lawn, we will use a power mower instead of a scythe, and if we clean a carpet, we will use a vacuum cleaner instead of ripping the carpet up and hanging it outside so that we can beat it with a carpet beater. If we are cold, we will adjust the thermostat on our forced-air heater instead of going outside with an ax to chop down a tree, and a maul to split the wood so that it will fit into our wood-burning stove.
Is this laziness, or is this convenience and time-saving? Presumably, in Karen De Coster’s world view, if it is an obese person doing these things, such as riding a scooter around Walmart, then it is laziness, for she believes that they “should” do much more walking because she feels that it is proper for them to exercise in order to lose weight, a goal that she demands.
Ms. De Coster attempts to sweeten her argument by stating that her amputee brother who really NEEDS a scooter often can’t get one, because all the lazy obese have commandeered them, instead. Well, who’s not being self-reliant, here? Presumably her amputee brother needs a scooter ALL the time (his amputations do not come and go), so why doesn’t he have one of his own for use everywhere he goes, but is, instead, relying on Walmart to provide him one? How does he get through other stores, or is Walmart the only place he shops?
Think for a minute, if you will, of a Walmart shopper who is a hundred pounds overweight. No, let’s make it ninety pounds overweight…ninety pounds is the weight of a bag of cement. Okay, now you, the healthy, in-control, beautiful and perfect skinny person, are going to go shopping at Walmart. But what you must do the whole time you are over there is carry around with you a bag of cement. You like exercise right? Well, let this be your exercise. This is a bag of cement that you NEVER can put down, by the way, so you have been carrying it for months and months and months before you even started this particular Walmart shopping excursion. This bag of cement, you will sleep with, you will make love with, you will sit with when you watch TV, you will carry it with you into the shower, and you will have it with you at all times while you are at work (do you have a job that requires you to be on your feet?). Hum, are you getting just a little bit tired? Don’t you just want to put that burden DOWN? Well too bad, bucko, you’re just TOO LAZY, then. Don’t even THINK of lightening your load for even a moment by riding that scooter, you may frighten the easily offended Karen De Costers of the world and what you need is to exercise to lose weight! (But I wonder, why hasn’t that exercise lost the weight by now? An exercise that you are doing ALL the time, and yet not one pound comes off? Is there something wrong with the formula?)
I have a friend, who happens to be a phenomenally talented writer—published in real books and journals, not on-line blogs (need I say that she puts De Coster’s journalist hacking to shame?), who, when I met her, was in the process of getting her PhD at U.C. Berkeley. Is getting a PhD at Berkeley something for the lazy? Well, she got her PhD, but the most difficult thing for her was walking across that huge campus every day. Why? Well, she was overweight, overweight enough for someone like Karen De Coster to sneer at her as she passed. Overweight enough for her to have several broken bones inside both feet, bones that her podiatrist told her would never heal so long as she continued to put a load on them. The agonizingly painful broken bones in her feet would never heal unless she dropped out of school and stopped walking to class for several months. But the idea of that was impossible, because my friend was not only committed to her PhD program, which she hoped when it was completed would lead her out of the financial trap she was in, but she also was raising three children by herself after she and her children escaped from her violent and physically abusive husband. So she just lived with the painful broken feet and walked across campus, eventually earning her PhD and getting a job as a professor at another college where she was then able to work on getting her feet healed. If U.C. Berkeley happened to have a fleet of scooters for students to use for getting around campus, I can assure you she would have used them, and with great gratitude in her heart for the university’s compassion.
One might ask how this person happened to “allow herself to let herself go so much that she ended up obese and with broken feet”. Well, the lack of money was the largest factor (if we fail to take into account the stresses suffered by a battered wife trying to save the life of herself and her three children). Cheap food is incredibly fattening food. Is it smart to eat that way when you are poor, or trying to save money, or living on student loans? Well, obesity is an insidious condition, it creeps upon one slowly, whereas poverty is large and glaring and immediate and obvious. So what do you think a person in that situation will most likely do? (And notice that most people this obese are poor; does this show that they are lazy and therefore their laziness makes them BOTH poor AND obese, or is it just that their poverty leads to less healthy food choices?)
I have another friend, a hugely successful sales rep whose territory covers Washington State and British Columbia. This friend is always earning “most sales” or “most new customers” or “increased sales goals most often met” awards at her company. She makes quite a lot of money and I would venture to say that this person is not lazy, either. Yes, she is overweight. Why? Because she eats out in restaurants a lot…almost every meal, actually. You tend to do that when you are on the road all the time. Do you think that when she is selling her wares at some island off the coast of British Columbia, that when it is lunch time, she will drive back home to her apartment in Seattle and fix herself a healthy lunch? No, she will go out to eat, then continue to meet with her various customers, then go out for dinner, then check into a motel for the night. There’s a lot of walking involved in this job, too, from some hard-to-find parking space on a city street to a small store several blocks away (or up a steep hill), or to several stores inside of a huge shopping mall. I wonder why all this walking didn’t help her to lose weight? Instead, it led to her needing to have her knees replaced due to wear and tear on her joints. Do you also understand that each time she had a knee replaced (these operations are done separately, one knee at a time), this meant that she had to STOP working for several months and this then meant that her income STOPPED, too? So it took her quite a while to finally go ahead and schedule these surgeries, which in quite a practical way meant that she was in danger of losing her job, or her well-won territory. Meanwhile, until she could complete both surgeries, she continued to walk and travel and sell with agonizing knee pain…yet if Karen De Coster or one of her non-feeling compatriots happened to see my friend obtaining a moments’ relief by riding a scooter, they would frown and look down on her and shake their heads in dismay at the gall of one so able demonstrating such laziness…for something that really was none of their damned business. Just be thankful YOU don’t need, or want, to ride an a scooter.
I could go on and on and on with these stories, which could be repeated countless times in a universe of other examples, but the principle should be clear without further examples, anyway. Unless you have walked a mile in an obese body, then you ought to shut the hell up. You don’t KNOW the daily misery of being in an obese body, and I’m not going to describe it to you. Maybe if you sit and think about it for a while, you’ll begin to figure out a part of it, but even then, you wouldn’t be able to imagine the whole of it if you had never actually experienced it.
You may THINK you know the business of a fat person, what they did wrong to get that way and what they should do right to get out of it, but if you do think that, then you are an idiot. Only a liberal, nanny-state-loving Nazi thinks they know how another person should live. A person who believes in freedom doesn’t sneer at those who are exercising that right (which in the case of the obese, is only exercising the right to exist and get around the best way they can during this present time; and then, maybe when the right combination of events and circumstances occur, they will choose to commit to a program of their own choosing and an effort that suits them that will succeed in getting their excess weight off; or maybe not). And while you may view their condition as unhealthy and life-threatening (the obese understand this far better than you do) and you therefore wish to justify your suggested controls on their lives as being for their own good (such AS, for example in other arenas, MANDATORY health insurance or retirement fund savings), you must understand how society could likewise turn against you and apply some “for your own good” controls for some other “unhealthy” habits, conditions, and activities that involve you.
In Ms. De Coster’s case, among her various interests, she is into machine guns and riding Harleys. I think that’s her perfect right and I would work to see to it that she is allowed to pursue these, and other, activities unmolested. But don’t you think that to some nosy busy-bodies, this might look like an accident waiting to happen? To people like those, machine guns and Harleys would be Ms. De Coster’s “obesity”.
