The Beviad–musings, mutterings and myths

We are going to get a new computer tomorrow. Finally. Our computer is eight years old, which apparently is old for a computer. But then, our tv is sixteen years old and still doing fine, so to me, eight years seems hardly any time at all.

However, our old machine is limping along. Hardly a day goes by without ramming up against its inadequecies. I can’t easily access Moodle. Yesterday I spent an hour on the phone, being walked through the way to get Moodle, and failing, even with a change of password. Finally I had to download another browser than Internet Explorer, which is too lame to do much. I downloaded iCab, which has a little yellow taxi that runs through a snowstorm in the top right-hand corner as the server is working to connect you. It stalled twice on me. Finally, after I’d thanked the IIT girl for her help and decided I just wouldn’t be able to send my essay to my prof, I tried one more time, got Moodle and sent my essay in. But I had wasted an afternoon simply trying to do a simple thing which, if it works, takes all of ten minutes.

I can’t access the blog of Edith, my sister-in-law, which is sad, although I can at least see the photos of her wonderful paintings all over it. There is just a blank where her words should be. I have no idea why, especially since I was able to get it for years. It’s like my not being able to run any more, or dance: it’s just gone.It will be nice to read her words again.

Most websights that involve pictures are also inaccessible. I’m always amazed when I find something I can actually see like other people supposedly can. Sometimes my computer’s age is combined with its being a Mac rather than a PC. And yet we are getting another Mac, an iMac. I guess it’s just like preferring coke over pepsi; you get attached to a brand and feel comfortable with it; in the case of Macs, it’s even part of my identity. “I’m a Mac person,” I like to think. I twitch appreciatively when, in a movie, I see the apple logo on the back of a laptop that the lead character is using. To me, it’s like a masonic handshake; it makes me like that person/character even more. I appreciate the new Mac ads on tv, too, with the Mac person young and artistic and hip and the PC person in a suit, looking suitably out of it. Yup, that’s how I see myself —well, maybe not ‘young’ young, but young of heart, open of mind, of spirit.

This is the best soup I’ve had in a long time, and reminds me of the wonderful Pho (the word means ’soup’ in Vietnamese, apparently, so ‘Pho soup’ is a bit redundant) that I had with Joanie and Adam in Vancouver where Pho shops are all over. I got it from a book called ‘The 125 Best Soup Recipes’ by Marilyn Crowley and Joan Mackie. It will fill you up, make you feel virtuous (since it has no grease or fat in it and, I’m sure, low calories), and will clear your sinuses! It is a full meal, and looks more complicated than it is; it’s easy enough that I dictated it to John while he cooked it, since I had a bad cold. And together we ate the full ’serves 4′ amount shown here, in deep soup bowls. Thus, you might double this recipe for 4 actual people to allow for seconds.

GREAT PHO SOUP

INGREDIENTS

4 oz. lean, boneless top round or siloin steak

1/2 cup-1 cup of corkscrew pasta

large carton of beef broth,or 2 cans of consomme, plus 2 cups of water

1 twi each ounce of ginger, sliced thinly

1 tbsp. fish sauce (this is found in a supermarket in the chinese/thai food section, and comes in liquid form in a small bottle. It’s just anchovy juice, apparently.)

2 large mushrooms, thinly sliced

2 green onions, thinly sliced

1 cup of julienned snow peas

1 tsp. lime juice (the stuff in the green plastic bottle is fine.)

DIRECTIONS

1. Place uncovered meat on a piece of foil and chill in freezer for 15 minutes.(Or, defrost frozen steak until it is cutable.)

2.Meanwhile, generously cover the pasta with tap-hot water and let soak for 15 minutes.

3. While pasta soaks, put beef broth, ginger and fish sauce in large pot and bring to boil. Reduce heat and simmer, covered, for 5-10 minutes.

4. Meanwhile, cut meat very thinly into strips, then cut strips into 2 inch pieces.

5.Place raw meat slices in bottom of heated, deep soup bowls.

6. Scatter mushrooms, green onions and snow peas in bowls.

7. Remove ginger from broth and discard (do this with a sieve or slotted spoon).

8. Stir in lime juice. Bring broth to rolling boil again; ladle into bowls. The heat of the broth will cook the vegetables and the meat, miraculously.

Serve with bottles of lime juice and fish sauce on table; give each bowl a squirt of each one before eating it. Eat with spoon and fork, or with spoon and chopsticks.

At first, when I heard that the man who had held the girls in an Amish one room school had lost a baby daughter nine years ago, and had molested young female relatives when he was 12, I thought, maybe he could only see death and possible molestation for little girls, and wanted to put them out of that misery before they encountered it. I was being too charitable. It now turns out that he planned to sexually molest them all. He took shackles along, plus a tube of the kind of gel that is used in sex. Only when the police came did he start to execute the girls, one at a time, by shooting them in the head. Now there are 5 dead and six seriously injured by gun wounds. Finally, as the police burst into the room, he killed himself.

In his letter to his wife, he said he had been dreaming about those previous, adolescent molestings, and knew he wanted to do that again. He also said that since the death of his infant daughter nine years he had felt angry with God, angry at the world, at the thought that little Elisa could have been with them but wasn’t. But this man had a young daughter and son, and his wife says he was a good father to them. She says ‘This isn’t the man I was married to for ten years.’ What happened to him?

After all the school shootings lately, and the sex cases of numerous pedaphiles, I find myself beginning to feel very negative towards men. Then, last night, I was reading a Peter Robinson mystery novel,”Strang Affair’ and came upon a passage that seemed strange to me. Robinson’s detective, Chief Detective Inspector Alan Banks, has gone to London to investigate the disappearance of his brother and the death of the young woman his brother had been dating. He tells the girl’s roommate about the death, she faints, then breaks into tears. He comforts her by putting his arms around her. She recovers a bit, then, when she discovers that he has no place in London to stay, demurely offers her spare bedroom to him. He hesitates, thinking to himself, “What if she cried out during the night? What if, when he went into her room, she was naked under the blankets? He was, after all, only a man.”

Only a man? It’s as if he has no self control. Yet he is a decent man, albeit one who is divorced because his work takes up his life. He is not a ladies’ man or one who sizes women up with sexual or sexist ideas. Why would a male novelist make such a man fear loss of control that way because of possible sexual attraction—to a woman who’s grieving? Are men so filled with roaring, flaming sexual drive that they can barely restrain themselves most of the time? And this is an ordinary, mentally healthy 50 year old man. What about the sexually sick ones, the pedaphiles, the rapists?

And the violence! From what is happening in Iraq to what happened at Dawson recently, it seems as if men cannot be trusted with guns. Or will make bombs even if they know that they will kill civilians.

I find myself wondering what the world would be like if there were no men. Would women ever kill the number of people men used to? Would there be no more war? No more sexual abuse? What would we lose if we abolished men, except for their sperm, of course?

Then I have to restrain myself and remember the millions of ordinary men, like my husband and many other men that I know, who are decent and who, if they have raging testosterone, keep it leashed. I must resist gender stereotyping, based on a few rotten apples that are male. But I can see why, in the 19th century, women’s groups tried to get men to eat cereal rather than meat, hoping it would make them less violent (The Kellogg’s Institute was based on this idea.) They wanted men to stop beating their wives and starting wars. Today, we have the same desires. But I don’t think that cereal will do the trick.