Sunday/Superbowl/Stream

Parenting is constant and tiring and unlikeable at times. Add a slumber party into the mix, and I guarantee you’ll want to run.
The Patriots did, by most accounts, cheat during DeflateGate and maybe have again since, but are, objectively, an exceptionally amazing team, and Tom Brady, while likely insufferable IRL, is a bot-like specimen that sort of proves Malcolm Gladwell’s point about practicing things tens of thousands of times and being committed and steadfast. One must admire his athleticism, mental fortitude, and talent. One need not admire Belichick’s attire.
The Saints were robbed by an extremely horrible call. Shoulda been Saints-Pats.
donald trump is a deeply horrible person who lies more than he breathes and is an abject, disgraceful blotch on America. I truly loathe him.
Maroon 5 needs to go away. Does Adam Levine actually play the guitar, or does he just wear it around his neck like an accessory? I ask because his looks extremely undersized. I don’t understand the tank he wore during the SB halftime. I dislike tattoos.
Ralph Northam needed to resign two days ago. NO ONE in 1984 should have been in blackface and they MOST DEFINITELY should not have donned KKK robes.
Thank GOD I have a cat. I often like him best of all things.
It is utterly dismaying that rabid pro-life arguers will rear their vitriolic heads once again in 2020. Sigh.
I folded and ordered an InstantPot yesterday.
Last week, while volunteering at World Central Kitchen, I got to briefly speak to the indomitable Nancy Pelosi. I thanked her SO profusely for everything. I later watched the RBG documentary (fabulous) and ordered an XL “I Dissent” RBG collar necklace. I love men, but you know what, now is the time for women and our leadership and our voices. The ship is listing. Let others try.

NANCY!

The shutdown continues as does World Central Kitchen and its new locations and Resource Center

Earlier this week, I worked at World Central Kitchen’s new Resource Center. Next door to the café, it provides furloughed workers with fresh groceries (nothing canned!), infant formula, diapers, feminine products, and pet food. Additionally, companies like Pepco, Washington Gas, and Verizon are there helping people with bills: deferred payments, avoiding late fees, and so forth.

I was on the product distribution team. We made thousands of sacks of groceries and handed them out to everyone in the line passing our table en route to diapers and the fruit station. In terms of physicality, it was easier than working in the kitchen. But emotionally, it was a more direct link to everyone hurt by this ludicrous shutdown. And it was hard and humbling and deeply moving.

A number of people were teary or in tears. Some seemed or said they were embarrassed. There were parents, kids, babies, owners worried about their pets. There were women in need of Poise pads who were so ashamed to have to carry them out, prompting us to resuscitate all manner of box or bag in hopes of helping them be discreet. I talked to one man who’s been furloughed from USAID, the irony of which was not lost on either of us. Another man shared that his wife, a nonprofit worker, was laid off last year, and now he’s been without pay since before Christmas. They have kids. I shared many hugs. Countless folks thanked me. As if I was doing anything really except trying to thank and honor them.

Whole worlds upended, near and longer term futures forcibly adjusted, happily employed people waiting in food lines with heads bowed. IN THIS NATION’S CAPITAL. And throughout the country.

Representatives Joe Kennedy from MA and Eleanor Holmes Norton from DC visited Chef Andrés while I was there. Later, Senators Van Hollen and Cardin (Maryland!) went. Nancy Pelosi helped the day before. Yesterday, the café served 11,400 meals. Today, the Republicans voted to keep the government shut down. Please watch this powerful, fact-based, historically-accurate and provable rebuttal by Colorado Senator Michael Bennet.

(In addition to opening the Resource Center this week, WCK also expanded its reach to feds in 20 states and Puerto Rico!! You can click this link to see the various WCK locations and also participating restaurants offering free or reduced-price meals to feds.)

The book we chose for the Open Discussion Project’s next discussion is How Democracies Die by Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky. It’s eerie, really. I am well-informed but maybe I wish I weren’t. Part of me wishes I didn’t see so clearly how trump’s behavior tracks almost exactly with the four warning signs Ziblatt and Levitsky lay out in a nation’s descent from democracy to authoritarianism. (If you want to watch the authors present the Cliff’s Notes of the book, click here.) And in votes like today’s, I see people enabling the fall. For NOTHING but fear and/or ephemeral popularity or relevance.

For what it’s worth, I’ve not met one trump supporter volunteering to help furloughed workers.

World Central Kitchen and generosity; the flip of ugliness

The pace of a busy commercial kitchen is thrilling. Add to it a shared sense of purpose, compassion, generosity, and smiles, and you’ve got José Andrés’ World Central Kitchen pop-up on Pennsylvania Avenue, here in DC. I arrived just before 8am yesterday morning, donned a WCK hat, and was put to work stripping mint leaves from stems in the rear of the kitchen. Chef Elsa, a volunteer from Lake Tahoe who was overseeing the dip, sauce, and sandwich station where I worked, was all smiles and all business. The requisite black chef pants, a few tattoos, a knit cap. I loved her completely and immediately.

Other volunteers arrived as eager to work as I was, and we quickly slipped into a rhythm. Amanda must have sliced 2,000 fresh rolls, Kay plucked anything brown from fresh lettuce leaves before laying them in orderly fashion on sheet pans, Kristin diced tomatoes and added them to the tzatziki. I delivered the enormous mountain of mint to the guy making aioli with an industrial-sized immersion blender, stirred four vats of the tzatziki with a paddle so large you could have rowed a boat with it, and then moved into sandwich prep. We were in and out of the walk-in. Someone brought around homemade cinnamon rolls.

By 10:45, we heard a line had formed out front. The doors opened at 11, and we were off to the races. At one point, Elsa moved me up to the front line to bag warm steak sandwiches as quickly as the meat guy could get steak from the grill and lay it generously atop the aioli, lettuce, and tomato-prepped rolls we’d just made in the back. Kay squeezed them shut, I took them firmly and gingerly nestled them in the bag.

“Sandwiches, sandwiches! We need more sandwiches!”

We struggled to keep up. Next to me, Hillary scooped steaming quinoa into boxes and drizzled it with meyer lemon sauce before letting the falafel guy add to it.

“Fire soup, fire soup!”

Everyone was smiling, thankful -to give and receive- and so very kind. Many of the volunteers were furloughed workers themselves; Hillary hasn’t been at work or paid since before Christmas. A single mother of three asked if she could have extra food for her children. Of course.

the line out front of WCK; it went around the block.

It was cold outside, and the line snaked around the block (see above photo). One incredible DCer, set to retire next week, brought $640 (what she had in her wallet + what she could withdraw from the ATM) to the line and started handing out $20s. Many people just asked for a hug. She said, ““These are people that I owe a debt to because they’re doing a job on my behalf and they’re not being paid…At the core of it I’m a human being and I live here. I know how hard it is to get back up the economic ladder. We’re pushing people out of their economic social status as we speak. And it’s not going to take a week or two for them to recover.”

WCK served 4,400 meals on Wednesday, 5,568 or something on Thursday, and I later found that we did more than 6,400. I’m sure today was no different. Chef Andrés has just announced that #ChefsForFeds will be expanding across the nation to help feed our citizens until the shutdown is over. If you can donate or want to help, visit https://www.worldcentralkitchen.org/

Yesterday in DC was also the March for Life. During it, in my opinion, we saw some of the ugliest and most exclusivist of humanity. Concurrently, the Indigenous People’s March peacefully protested environmental degradation, genocide, and violence against Native women. My heart was wrecked and my fury was orbital to find teenage boys, led by fellow student Nick Sandmann, from Covington Catholic school in Kentucky mob and ridicule a Native elder (himself a Vietnam vet who  holds a regular ceremony for Native American veterans at Arlington National Cemetery ). The boys, March for Life participants, were wearing red Make America Great Hats, in case you haven’t seen their heinous behavior (video in the attached link), grinning with such ugly, evil, disdain and cheering each other on that I actually feel sick each time I see the footage. Here is Nathan Philips’, the elder, response.

It also emerged today that a recent Covington Catholic grad this past weekend held a woman down, choked and ignored her pleas to stop, and raped her until she bled. He has been charged with one count of rape and two counts of sodomy. This was not his first sexual assault offense.

I struggle to hope for the future if kids like these are part of the youth coming up. They are disgusting bigots, examples of toxic masculinity and entitlement, the worst sort of smug “Christians” who fancy themselves Christ-like but are everything but. Think Brett Kavanaugh! Who must their parents be? Why didn’t the school chaperones, who were at the March too, do something? Should you wish to reach out to Covington Catholic School, its phone number is 859-491-2247. Its address is 1600 Dixie Highway, Park Hills, KY, 41011. The principal’s email is browe@covcath.org, and the superintendent of the district, who was a trip chaperone, is Mike Clines. On Twitter he is @supmikeclines.

I will try to focus on people like Chef Andrés, on the volunteers who came from all over to help, on the woman who handed out $20s and hugs, on all the Facebook friends -some of whom I’ve never even met IRL- who donated to World Central Kitchen since I shared my experience there yesterday. I will hope that there are more fine young people than awful, cruel ones. I will celebrate the good in the world, including all the amazing people who marched today, and hope that we can vanquish trump and his grotesque divisiveness and craven mean-spiritedness before our democracy crumbles. It’s hard to stay hopeful sometimes.