X-Treme Tea Time has a new home-- I'm moving my blog onto my personal website at Spider Stories. My mom surprised me today with the move and a beautiful new layout, and I'm very excited. So come check it out and keep up with whatever crazy mess I get into next.
First off, Slumdog Millionarewas a freaking fabulous movie. It had everything-- tragedy, comedy, suspense, true love, and a single Bollywood dance number. The cinematography was inspiring and the soundtrack kept you wired the whole time.
It was also very strange seeing the Indian slums outside of the pages of National Geographic. There was one beautiful shot from above the corrugated metal roofs of children running through the streets, and it kept cutting away to a the same moment of action from higher above, showing just how vast the slums are.
There was another moment that felt especially foreign to me-- a part showing people working on a giant trash heap in a dump picking through the garbage to fill giant sacks with anything that could be ameliorated or sold. For a few seconds, I was struck by how different that experience is from that that I am lucky enough to have, and that most everyone I know is lucky enough to have, by the difference between life in America and life in India. But then I remembered that a few days ago I had seen an abandoned house, the final contents of which had been splayed out all over the front yard to be picked over before the bank's agents cleaned it up for foreclosure sale. Crowds and crowds of people drove or walked up to pick through whatever the previous family had left behind-- broken desk chairs, dirty pillows and sheets, old bags, an exercise ball, some televisions from the 1980s. Poverty is poverty, and while the motives of the people picking through the trash may have been somewhat different, and though the scales of poverty are numerically divided, the images were so similar it was hard to shake.
Slumdog Millionare was so much the sort of story we love to hear in America-- the story of someone who starts out with nothing gaining everything, and touching a community in the process. Perhaps it was also the telling of the story of the American dream in India that put the image of the trash pickers (and so many other moments in the movie, for that matter) in close proximity to the stories and images of poverty in the West. We have more in common globally than we like to think, or often assume. Perhaps that is why Slumdog has gotten such rave reviews here in the States-- we see that we have in common an archetypal story of rags to riches and also many things in common we need to work on so that rags to riches stories can become a mythological literature of the past.
A girl I knew in middle and high school (but, sadly, mostly lost touch with) is attending Oxford University for grad school. Every time she posts pictures on Facebook, I get a little ping of envy because she is living in a city I have come to really love and will probably not get to see again for a long time. Also, in the interest of complete honesty, despite my massive objections to GPS and the culture there, I have a wee obsession with old, traditional schools, whether it is John Irving's depictions of New Hampshire boy's schools or A Separate Peace or Rory going to Yale on The Gilmore Girls or grand old schools like Oxford and Cambridge.
To get to the point of my posting, the Oxford scholar I am acquainted with posted some lovely shots of Oxford in the wintertime. I wish I could stay there long enough to see the city and the surrounding countryside during all seasons-- the snow is too picturesque for words. It's probably ten kinds of uncool to borrow a couple of her photos and post them here to share, especially since I'd prefer not to out her by using her name in photo credits, but I can't resist since I post sporadically about my own Oxford adventures. Both are shots I have my own summer equivalents of somewhere-- I believe the first is from the cloisters at Magdalen college and the second is along the Oxford canal, where I spent many a pleasant summer afternoon reading and watching the locals bicycle, stroll, boat, and goof off. It's bad enough not being there, but on top of it we are having almost spring-like weather here in Chattanooga again, and have had almost nary a flake of snow to mark the occasional cold snaps all winter. Proper snow on such a backdrop as Oxford is enviable indeed. I wish I could see "my" manor house out in Yarnton all dressed up in winter white.
EDIT: A-HAH! A little Googling and Flickring found me some shots of Yarnton in the wintertime. A pretty sight indeed!
And here's a cool one of the heads at the Sheldonian-- I love how the snow clung mainly to their hair and beards. It's like they've been colored in.
What with the temperatures in Chattanooga being freakish and unbearable the past couple days (22 but it feels like 12? No thanks!) and my stress level running proportionally opposite to the temperature, I needed a good winter soup to warm me up and calm me down.
Fortunately, I ran across this awesome recipe in this magazine (I think, it was on Dear Boyfriend's nigh-sister-in-law's counter top, and I didn't pay much attention to the title) and scribbled down the ingredients. I rarely follow a recipe very closely. I am a Southern girl and think that measuring cups in the kitchen are about as useful as shoes in the summer time.
So I simply heated up as much water as looked like it would be a good batch of soup, and through in enough chicken bullion to make some tasty broth. A whole head of cauliflower got chopped into tiny pieces in my food processor and chucked into the soup. A single granny smith apple followed suit, as did some carrots I found in the fridge. The original recipe didn't call for carrots, but I love how they add color and sweetness to most soups. I threw in garlic pepper, regular pepper, Italian seasoning and the barest dash of curry powder. Let it simmer for about 45 minutes to an hour and then ran it through a blender to get a creamy, thick porridge consistency.
It was divine on a cold February night, completely vegan, and met Dear Boyfriend's seal of approval. This later item is truly high accolades-- Dear Boyfriend usually lacks fondness for my vegetarian and vegan dishes because they aren't rich or flavorful enough. In my defense, I personally like to let the vegetables speak for themselves quite a bit in cooking, and admittedly often confuse spicing for flavor with spicing for insane cajun heat. But this soup turned out flavorful without being spicy and tasty even to a picky carnivore. Go grab a cauliflower before it warms up around here and get cooking!
When I was 17, my mom, a friend of ours, and I flew to New York City to protest the Republican National Convention. Hundreds of thousands of people were there, but the numbers were downplayed by the media. Never the less, it was a colorful explosion of costumes, signs, and positive energy rallied around the negativity of a second Bush term. Some of the protesters I remember the most were those calling attention to women's issues under Bush. I'd only recently left Girls Preparatory School, where attending an Ivy League to find a husband was considered feminist, and I was still trying to develop my own sense of what feminism meant beyond GPS's slightly antiquated definition.
At the Convention protest, there was a fabulous group of middle aged ladies wearing pink satin slips carrying signs that said "Pink Slip Bush," encouraging he be fired. There were the Axis of Eve girls showing off their weapon of mass seduction panties over crazy colored tights and roller skating through Manhattan. And there was one protester, whose face I've since forgotten, who was carrying a huge blown up photo mounted on cardboard. It showed Bush, surrounded by men, signing a law pertaining to women's health and in big white letters the sign asked "Where are all the women?"
This morning, I was so happy to turn on the TV by chance and see Obama sign the Lilly Ledbetter law into effect. I know so many women have not had fair treatment in the workplace, and I've had my own small brushes with sexual harassment and a struggle to get the pay check due to me. But the shot of Obama sitting at the desk, pen in hand, surrounded by a beautiful fan of women wearing every color in the rainbow is truly a sign to me that times are changing. Especially after his touching comments about his grandmother's experience with the glass ceiling and his hope that his daughters can "grow up in a nation that values their contributions, where there are no limits to their dreams and they have opportunities their mothers and grandmothers never could have imagined." After this morning, I feel sure that when it comes to looking back on Obama, no one will be able to ask "Where are all the women?"
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