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In the past few months I’ve made a gentle transition away from my Big Mac-devouring ways and into something that looks a mite like ersatz veganism - meets - Manhattan-dwelling cavewoman.  For example, now I order veggie burgers from Burger King.

It breaks down like this:

1. I try to eat vegan as much as possible
2. I start out the day by nursing 32 ounces of a freshly-blended fruit+ smoothie with a scoop of Vega (the plus allows for the occasional freshly-plucked mint leaf, handful of raw almonds or cashews, chunk of avocado, and upcoming 1/4 c of spinach; my base is generally sun tea or any of the non-milk milks (rice, almond, or soy))
3. I continue to graze on a blend of raw nuts & dried fruits throughout the day
4. I’ll eat a healthy din of vegetables, rice, etc.
5. I only eat meat for a few days every month.  If you are squeamish then do not read the following phrase:  “When she bleeds, she feeds.”

My thinking, greatly encouraged by a nutrition enthusiast’s exhortations of The China Study (short math:  if more than 5% of your caloric intake comes from meat, your health is negatively impacted), is that woman in the wild eats in a manner consistent with our bodies’ optimal functioning, and this is inconsistent with modern food production.  So, I try to frame my approach to food with one question as the guiding principle:  How would my cavesister eat?

Well, my cavesister would eat a lot of fresh stuff, generally gravitating towards the goods that were about to turn (read: the really ripe picks), and have easier access to nuts than, say, a slab of red meat. However, once there was a kill, she’d probably wild out for a few days, and then simmer down over the next few weeks until the next beefalo waddled into town.

So this was how I was viewing the world when I met The Institute for Hermetic Philosophy’s David Richeson.  (Stay with me, folks, especially you with the fried chicken drumstick in your hand.)  David and I spoke at length about the additional (or perhaps related) benefit of returning your blood to an alkaline state.

Short:

• Lotsa meat makes your blood acidic
• Spinach and its peeps makes your blood alkaline
• Your body is happy when your blood is alkaline

As I researched the matter, imagine my delight when an article on basic eating underscored the general awesomeness of my eat-like-a-cavegrrl framework:

Our hunter-gatherer ancestors consumed a diet very different from what’s typical today. The diet was based on minimally processed plant and animal foods. But with the advent of agriculture, the standard Western diet changed greatly.

• Grains were introduced into the diet after the appearance of stone tools. Refined grains were available after the invention of automated rolling and sifting devices.
• Milk, cheese and other milk products were introduced with the domestication of livestock.
• Salt consumption rose when technology to mine, process, and transport it became available.
• Meat consumption increased with animal husbandry. It further increased with the advent of technology that enabled grains to be efficiently fed to cattle, which allowed cattle to be fattened quickly.
• Sugar consumption has risen since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

Oh, yes! I grunted, scratching my girl-parts while eyeing the nits in your hair.

At this point, for better or for worse, the nutrition enthusiast felt comfortable revealing an additional interest in restricting caloric intake for longevity purposes. (It seems we all want more life, f—–.)  To be honest, the veggie thing has made me feel so much more energetic, light, and fresh that I probably could’ve been told by The Nutritionist that eating hair-nits gives you firmer thighs and considered it gospel.

That said, my friend Houser and I did try a liquid diet back at the Academy, and I rather enjoyed my 90 day trial run of Mormonism (ca. last century) and its attendant monthly fasts, so I was intrigued.  Anyway, what better way to recreate the dietary analogue of crouching behind a basement mattress than denying yourself the full bounty of American excess?

And so this past week, I happened to be swinging through a local organic shopPE and noted a brochure for various week-long sorta-fasting (slowing?  middle-distancing?) regimens.  I sent it to The Nutritionist for review and got a thumbs down.  The real benefits, it seems, come from a true emptying, an upside-down colonic if you will, where the only thing you jam into your mouth is water.

Okay okay okay.

This is where Anittah has to regroup.

• Anittah used to hover above the plates of her elementary school classmates and work through their untouched macaroni and cheese entrees while they all streamed out to recess on the playground.  (Lightbulb:  the social isolation was not correlated with race at all!  Holy!)
• Anittah used to fill two trays after crew practice in college, each day, every day.
• Anittah has been known to pluck slices of pizza from boxes that are in the trash, just so long as said trash can is indoors, and no other items seem to be compromising said pizza slice.
• Anittah used to sniff, “I love animals.  They taste delicious.” and hail the yumminess of 2% milk-milk whilst rolling her eyes at the meh-inducing “eating meat is cruel” crowd.

How on earth could I possibly work fasting into my regimen?!? Especially with all this other junk on my to-do list?

Enter Four Hour Workweek boy.

Now, as Yale ‘99 Class Secretary, I’m actually not allowed to read anything created by any Princeton alum, as Princeton doesn’t matter.  So you can see how important perfecting my alimentary algorithm really is for me to take such a risk.

As Ferris summarized:

An enterprising scientist decided to try a little twist on the caloric restriction experiment. He divided the genetically-similar animals into two groups, fed one group all it wanted and measured the intake, then fed the other group all it wanted - except every other day instead of daily. When the intake of the group fed every other day was measured, it turned out that that group - the intermittently fasted group - ate just about double on the eat days, so that overall both groups consumed the same amount of food. Animals in the one group at X amount of food per day while the animals in the other group ate 2X amount of food every other day. So both groups ate the same number of calories but the commonality ended there.

The intermittently fasted group of animals despite consuming the same number of calories as the ad libitum fed group enjoyed all the health and longevity benefits of calorically restricted animals. In essence, they got their cake and ate it, too.

Right, so, sometimes I make a joke about being Asian on odd days and white on even days.  Ha ha.  But now I really can eat 4,000 calories in one twenty-four hour period (my white days), and 0 for the next (my China Study days), and reap the benefits of a longer life without all the curmudgeonly, irritable, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD I WANT SOME KFC WHY DO MY NEIGHBORS HAVE TO MAKE FRIED CHICKEN EVERY FRIDAY costs.

And this is in line with cave-grrl-ism as food was not readily available at all times:

• No fridges!
• No modern foodstuff distribution networks!
• No aggressive wielders of Chinese restaurant menus pacing the halls of apartment buildings!

So, in sum, this notion of intermittent as opposed to days-at-a-stretch fasting is awesome, and I may even try this, but definitely not until after Labor Day weekend, since I’m heading to Nashville for festivities that include a southern barbecue.

Now, if I could just figure out a way to ensure the arrival of Aunt Flo by 11 a.m. Sunday.

I must be a little slow on the uptake these days as I hadn’t connected Obama’s being biracial when I blogged earlier about the apparent newsworthiness of the experiences of mixed folk.  But it seems my people are rising up and will no longer let “Choose one” boxes keep us down.

Speaking generally on being brown in Tony Castro’s “King’s ‘Dream’ takes on new life: In Valley, African-Americans have become part of the middle class” from Wednesday’s Los Angeles Daily News is Morris Pichon, 66 (bolding mine):

You learn to avoid where you’re not wanted. You learn to avoid heartbreak. You learn to be invisible, if you can.

Later in the same article, lawyer Erikson Albrecht is quoted as follows:

The younger people are, the more social worlds they have for themselves that aren’t necessarily reflective of their ethnicity…  I’m biracial, and I’ve always kind of lived my life not feeling particularly penned in anywhere, but having multiple circles of friends and multiple worlds that I live in.

But my identity, from an external point of view, I’m African-American to the majority of people in the world.

What’s interesting is that over here on this coast, in today’s New York Daily News, Bronx resident Sandra Boer is quoted by Patrick Huguenin in “Speech Is Life Of Party In Harlem:  Thrilled cafe throng chants ‘Yes we can!’” as follows:

I’m half-Ecuadoran and half-Hungarian…  I always felt like, ‘Where do I fit in?’ And Obama to me is such an interesting, eclectic mix.

He can understand a wide range of people, and he has woken up passion in people.

What’s curious to me is that on one side, people whose racial count >1 say that the ambiguity of their club membership is isolating (“internal loneliness” per Jolanda Williams).  On the other side, it’s liberating, to not be penned in, to be able to move between two worlds.

For me, I’d have to say that both experiences are true (I have not yet made the grid that sums upside vs. downside).  I do wonder if my observed childhood tendency to isolate myself from others was then reinforced by continuous messaging from those around me: I was different and did not belong in the club operated by the dominant status quo.  As PZ Myers wrote in “Variant Genes-In-Waiting,” Seed Magazine:

Development is a plastic process in which organisms respond not just to a genetic program, but also interact with the environment … Raise the temperature of the developing organism enough to force it to struggle to cope, but not enough to seriously injure it, and sometimes surprising and unpredictable changes occur…

All of this, perhaps, is why I have to disagree with one paragraph in today’s “His rise reflects promise of a generation,” penned by Errol Louis for the New York Daily News:

The question is whether America is ready to bid goodbye to the bias of the past and entrust a brilliant, gifted man with the highest office in the land without regard to the color of his skin.

I think that to ignore the insights and character that have surely come from Obama’s having experienced the tension between how he views himself and how he is viewed, from knowing how it feels to be an outsider, from also being able to move in different spheres –

To truly disregard the color of his skin and all the upsides and downsides that have come with that –

I mean, really; again from the Seed article:

each of us differs from our unrelated fellows by approximately 3 million (out of 3 billion) nucleotides (0.1%)

But that 0.1% has downstream impacts significantly larger than 0.1%.  So to ignore the color of his skin doesn’t make sense to me.  It’s my belief that he is that much more suited to the office because of the color(s) if his skin, and all that entails.

Am I off the mark on this?

(And by ‘off the mark’ I don’t mean ‘politically incorrect’ (<– yawn!); I mean ‘thinking suboptimally’.)

Now, even though you are clearly mocking the shape of an Asian eye in the photo below, I will still grant you a birthday wish.

Here’s also hoping you’ve changed your tee shirt since then, which may or may not be true given what you were wearing on Saturday night.

Happy birthday Aaron!

(Blog post > ecard > tweet > Facebook wall post?)

I enjoy the practice of accumulating, indexing, and categorizing things.

– Oliver Wasow

I suspect I might enjoy designing, rearranging and organizing my to-do list more than actually doing said to-do list.  That said, it occurred to me this morning that I can pimp out GCal to additionally operationalize my autumn goals.  I simply created different color-coded calendars, numbered appropriately (GCal sorts alpha), to keep myself on track.

Now, it’s easy for me to identify tasks related to my Stats class or my PhD research.  And if I uncheck a calendar (say, ‘Culturati‘) I am forced to focus on my allegedly higher priorities.

Phew, glad I got that sorted out.

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Last night was my first statistics class. While the professor walked us through the syllabus, her approach, and what was in store for us during the course of the semester, nearly a dozen to-do items bubbled up.

• Insert midterms and final dates into GCal
• Take Reuters I & II workshops
• Do homework for next Wednesday
• etc.

I reached for my cell phone to send some direct tweets to Remember the Milk so that later I could deck each action item against specific hours on my calendar. But then I thought, “What would this signal to the professor?”

She’s not going to know that I’m sending stats class-related to-do items to my task list. She’s going to think I’m screwing around. And 15% of my class grade is participation.

The phone went back into my bag. I activated my pen and turned a page in my quad-rule notebook. I made a list.

Clearly my barometer for what does and does not constitute news is way off. Not only did I assume that reactions to an early eighties documentary might have been hyperbolically described, but I was also taken aback when I read an insert in an early August Parade magazine. From Cassandra Franklin-Barbajosa’s “Walking a fine line: Being biracial is sometimes a delicate balancing act” (bolding mine):

“Most people can see that I’m mixed, but they think I look Polynesian,” she [”Miki Meek, an online travel producer for The New York Times” … “born to a Japanese mother and a white American father”] says. “I grew up in places that were largely Caucasian. I thought we were the only mixed family in the world. It was hard to deal with because when you’re little, you don’t think about race or what you look like. Your mom is your mom, and your dad is your dad.”

Things got harder for Meek once she entered school. “I was called Chink and gook and Jap,” she says, “and I didn’t really know what those things meant. I just knew that they meant I was different, but I wanted to be the same as everyone else.“

The article continues with Jolanda Williams, a 35 year old woman and daughter of a white German mother and black American father, expanding on what she calls an “internal loneliness”:

“It is a sense that I don’t belong,” she says, “and that I will forever have a separate experience from others because the world in which we live is unable to understand that existence is not based on white or black or any race, for that matter. But rather, existence is made up of many different important experiences. At the end of the day, I am who I am not because of race but because of the experiences I’ve had.”

The piece closes with some thoughts by “bestselling New York author and jazz musician James McBride … the son of a Jewish mother from Poland and an African-American father”:

“[Being biracial has] helped me understand that once you get to the humanity of a person, you discover that we’re all essentially the same. I’ve been given a lot from two different worlds. I choose to accept that as a real gift.”

I forget, sometimes, that many folks still don’t appreciate the nuances of being mixed race.

I forget, sometimes, that many folks still don’t appreciate the nuances of being human.

Speaking of summer camp, in a scene from Lois Siegel’s A 20th Century Chocolate Cake, a young Dov Charney speaks extemporaneously on The State’s usurping of private funds

You bring your own money; no two ways about it, they’ll take it, they’ll keep it in their little file, then they’ll give you a dollar here, a dollar there.

and goods

After the two days, all that stuff [leftover from parents’ care packages that campers hadn’t yet consumed] you gotta share.

to minimize social unrest

They just do it because they don’t want any poor kids to be jealous.

while inadvertently disincentivizing personal thrift

All them guys [the other campers], they ate day and night grapes and fruits and all these chocolate bars coming out of their ears, but you know, I save my stuff. And then all of a sudden, two days [later, the summer camp makes you] bring all your stuff for lunch.

That’s what we’re gonna eat.

And I didn’t hardly get anything.

likely resulting in a decreased rate of savings.

$20 says he sorted his food into piles.

• Balance of expenses-incurred-yet-no-time-to-file: $641.72
• 2/27 car service to JFK:  $38.50
• 2/27 - 2/29 hotel, Sonesta CoCo Grove:  $889
• 2/28 - 2/29 car rental:  $217.96
• 2/29 snack (purchased while distractedly losing laptop):  $11.64
• 2/29 Fort Lauderdale airport grub:  $14.26
• 2/29 JFK airport grub:  $13.68
• 3/1 taxi back from JFK:  $81.25

Current balance:  $1,908.01