Sweetening my Salty Tongue
I had a bit of an epiphany the other day—when I realized that I was guilty of being a total retard insensitive creep.
Forget the sailors, I curse with the vigor and frequency of a godless pirate. I try to minimize it as much as possible and have incorporated many useful stand-ins to my language thanks to the cleverness of scifi shows I love. Frak, Frick, Frell…all those satisfying F’s and hard k sounds that are just so satisfying to an angry tongue. I’ve been known to use sexual organs as expletive remarks as well—usually modified to make them grotesque rather than anatomical. Fuck Cock Balls was a refrain I used pretty heavily at one point, much to my mother’s dismay. I’m far from angelic when it comes to how I choose to express my frustration.
Even so I always refrained from using racial slurs or references to homosexuality as part of my salty repertoire. For my generation avoiding some of the more notorious and long-standing racial slurs has been taught from birth. We know better than to use Huck Finn language, the terms our grandparents will still use to our horror, but I was always frustrated by the acceptance of terms like “Gay” and “Fag” as a young child. I would lecture my peers, practically handing out S.P.E.W. badges in my more righteous moments, and even refused to associate with kids who didn’t understand why it was wrong.
This is why, when I finally had a moment where it clicked, I was both elevated and horrified by my understanding that the word retard needs to be evicted from my vocabulary.
This issue is hardly new and trendy—I’m late to the party. When I first became aware of the seeming embargo on the word “retard” I will admit I thought it was ridiculous. After all the literal meaning of the term is “Delay or hold back in terms of progress, development, or accomplishment.” After all a delay in say an insurance certificate could be said to retard the progression of your study start up. That’s a valid use of the dictionary definition of the term. The problem is that we don’t use this word in that manner 99% of the time. Most of the time we use the word retard to describe people who are developmentally disabled. Again at the inception of the use, it was a simple medical term. You can’t go around not-defining people purely because the medical condition you are defining is debilitating can you? No so I dismissed the concept of being insulted by this word as oversensitive poppycock.
Then one day I went to describe someone as a retard and I stopped myself. I realized that what I was about to do was equate someone born with a genuine mental disability to someone who was getting on my nerves for being willfully ignorant. A much better descriptor by the way and one that I find myself using a lot now. Willfully ignorant. But that got me to thinking…the reason I objected so strongly in my youth to the term “gay” was that it had been commandeered by our culture to be a word that meant inferior, stupid and unworthy. Hadn’t we done the same thing to retard? True or false: we primarily use this term, which describes a medical minority, to also mean lame, stupid, ineffective, uncool and not worth our time? So I was okay making the same kind of analogy that I so strongly objected to with regards to homosexuals for another group who similar to my gay friends, were just born different than me? When I used “retard” as an insult, I was in effect attempting to insult a person/thing by comparing it to mentally disabled people and in the process also insulting all of them as well. I was implying that being mentally disabled was wrong and using that to attack others. I was belittling people via association and insulting all parties in the process. I am disgusted with myself for taking so long to realize it. Call it an opening of the third eye if you will. Call it divine intervention. Call it inception. I don’t know what it was but I suddenly realized that my insistence upon using this word, after knowing it offended some people, was wrong.
I’m not about to stop cursing anytime soon. I find it too cathartic. Maybe I’ll have an epiphany about that sometime in the future. I can’t make any promises. I also am not going to stop thinking that shallow, lazy and willfully ignorant people are annoying. I simply cannot abide useless people. I will stop using the word retard in a manner that implies someone born with an intellectual disability is useless. There are those born disadvantaged and those who simply choose not to use the healthy brains they were given. When so many in the handicapped community work to overcome the obstacles they were given, not only was I being insulting but I was being inaccurate in using “retard” to describe someone who chooses to be lazy. The only thing I hate more than being an insensitive jerk is being a wrong, insensitive jerk. I was wrong to lower those with born mental disadvantages to be on the same level as creeps and lazy assholes. When I saw it from that perspective, I was appalled at myself.
I am genuinely and sincerely sorry it took me so long. I am also sorry for any slip-ups I may have in the future. I think part of the reason people resist this kind of change is because removing a word from our language is hard but not everything worth doing is ever easy, is it? With that in mind, how about an easy recipe to help with the hard journey to sweeten that salty tongue? Maybe a Salted Caramel Swirl Cheesecake would help?
It totally would.
Salty Sailor Caramel Cheesecake
An Olivia Original Read more
Then I thought about it some more and realized that if you consider insects “people too” you basically have to desist from eating anything manufactured. In fact even growing a backyard garden and employing some organic tricks for pest control would mean impacting and killing the insect population should be disallowed. At what point do you draw the line? In a normal day any plant processing your vegan agave nectar is going to kill a thousand insects simply as a side effect of running the plant. Bugs get in the gears; bugs get in the food; bugs get everywhere and they get filtered out. So I can’t really get on board with the anti-honey vegans. The issue of animal-cruelty hypocrisy has been pretty prescient lately when PETA was exposed for “putting down” up to 
I accept that in the natural order of things some animals eat other animals—and that I am one of those predators. That doesn’t limit my desire to see these animals raised humanely and slaughtered as painlessly as possible. I think of this way: torture is often seen as something worse than death. Keeping someone in a state of constant pain and agony until they desire to no longer exist is horrible and overall we tend to object to torture more vehemently than even death itself. I accept this because, as with the honey issue, finding a way to eliminate any negative effect of our human need to eat on other living creatures is impossible. I’m not convinced that honey farming, especially the small scale local level, is particularly harmful to the mental state of the insects. I do buy locally sourced honey and not just because I try to be a locavore, but because eating local honey has been demonstrated to help with allergies—local pollens and all that.
‘So it is,’ they answered, ‘But we call it lembas or way bread, and it is more strengthening than any food made by Men, and it is more pleasant than cram, by all accounts.’
I don’t necessarily believe in veganism as a sustainable whole-lifestyle choice. At least not for me. I certainly think it has applications; it’s a good diet model for people with serious obesity health concerns. With respect to animal welfare it is possible to find animal products from humanely raised animals so I don’t think someone has to cut all cheese out of their diets for this reason. As for killing animals for food…well I don’t have a problem with that aspect of it but I’m not going to judge anyone who does. Still that only means that people really need to go vegetarian if they are controlling where all the animal byproducts they consume come from. But again that would be at home. I really doubt Denny’s is getting their half & half from free-range, grass grazing cows
Yet still it has happened. I’m a social vegan. Oh you’ve never heard that term? Well basically when I eat out I stay on a vegan diet but at home I’m happy to go about my omnivore ways. Strange isn’t it? Typically you’ll hear about people doing the opposite—eating vegan at home but relaxing out in company because eating vegan socially is fucking hard. But my reasons make sense I swear… See here’s the thing I don’t have a problem with eating meat or byproducts from livestock. I do have serious problems with how the majority of livestock in this country is raised. I object to it on a number of levels and decided that if I’m going to be morally consistent at all then I need to start really watching what I eat when I’m eating out because that is where I have no control over where my food came from. Thus when I’m at home and I’ve bought the food myself, I’ll grill up a steak and slather it with blue cheese and runny quail egg. But if I’m out grabbing a bite at some corner diner? Odds are I’m asking for salad and a fruit cup. So what prompted this?
What makes dancing so cathartic, so therapeutic and just so damn much fun? It’s the release I think. It’s physical, if not always sexual, and requires that you trust in your body rather than letting your mind do all the work. Overthinking means you lose the beat. If you have a partner you need to be able to really let your body win out and react to theirs. If you let your brain worry about where his or her foot is going next, by the time you figure it out they are already two more steps ahead. That’s not to say it involves totally turning off your mind because I certainly feel like mine is still racing but it’s in a reactive mode rather than predictive. That’s a rare thing for me to be able to do and enjoy. As such a Type-A(sshole) I find myself craving the ability to plan and control the majority of the time so finding a situation where I can be comfortable not doing that is rare and worth relishing. In retrospect I wish I had taken ballet lessons when they had been offered as a child.
Going on Saturday didn’t cure all my problems. It didn’t end my celibate streak. The fact that I haven’t even so much as kissed someone since July rather horrified one of my friends. But it did reconnect me a little with the girl I’m supposed to be acting the age of. Plus the nice part about being on the dance floor is that no one is talking. No one is asking me what I do for a living and being impressed, or intimidated or suffering inferiority complex. Instead it’s pretty simple: can you keep up? For some reason people seem to be more up to that challenge on the dance floor than anywhere else with me. Of course that might just be because I’m not a very good dancer…. White girl dancing isn’t exactly that poetic or challenging is it? But I do it with gleeful abandon regardless of how good I am.
Then of course I realized upon getting home that I hadn’t really thought about what to blog once Passover was well, over. I mean I had such a convenient topic for posts and now pbbbbbblt total brain fart. So you’re getting just a random emotional download today. Sorry guys. There’s just nothing clever going on up here after work, yoga, taking care of my dog, improv class and studying for my clinical trial certification…. I feel like the most boring busy person in the world. But I love every second of it. I know it’s sick and twisted in a masochistic way but I’m just naturally happier when I’m juggling. Stillness outside the yoga room drives me up the wall. I’ve been wondering why.
Which means it’s a perfect time to talk about the Charoset on the Seder Plate. So far we’ve explored the two vegetables, both fairly bitter, and the oh-so -delightfully constrictive Matzo. You might be thinking that this whole thing pretty much sucks and why in the world would you want any part in it? Well the Charoset is kind of the antithesis of these things. It’s a sweet mixture of nuts, fruit, honey and wine and it’s absolutely everyone’s favorite thing on the Seder plate. After dipping our horseradish in salt water to remember the bitterness of slavery, we then dip a second piece in this mixture to symbolize the sweetness of freedom. This is in fact the subject of the third question the child is supposed to ask:
“Feed me with apples and with raisin-cakes;
Yeast, the microorganism which causes bread to rise, also is what breaks down wheat and gives bread flavor. As such traditional Matzo is pretty damn flavorless. Passover Matzo is made of only flour and water—nothing else. The rest of the year you can buy some pretty damn delicious versions (sour cream and onion egg matzo is delicious) but for Passover the plain kind is all that is allowed. Additionally no other leavened grain is to be eaten. Grains include: wheat, barley, spelt, oats and rye. These grains and anything produced with leavening are called “Chametz” and they are forbidden. Thus no pizza and no beer.
At one point in my life I would become essentially paralyzed by these problems and that fed into some nasty anxiety and depression. Now I’m at least able to function day to day without falling to pieces. Yet again another thing I attribute to…Bikram yoga. I know I know I promise this post isn’t about that AGAIN. But I do have to say that it’s the one thing that’s helped me learn how to better manage these situations. After all you have to learn how to refocus when you are trying to balance on your tip toes in a room that hot.
