Divorcing Friends

I don't understand people who have the same friends their entire lives. I've known people who have kept the friends they made in elementary school throughout adulthood. As little kids, our only criterion for picking friends is proximity; who you sat next to in class or who lived in your neighborhood and rode the bus to school with you. Some of us made friends with our parents' friends' children (proximity again) and some of us made friends at local activities, like sports or dance lessons (proximity + a common interest). We pick friends that happened to be right there, and then we keep them because they are fun. 

It's pretty much the same thing in high school. We probably have a bit more in common with our high school friends, but for the most part we pick our friends for superficial reasons (who is popular, who is cute, etc) or we stick with the same clique we belonged to in middle school.

When I entered my twenties, I was already sensing that my high school friends and I were growing apart. And that makes sense; we were becoming adults and when we grow up, take risks, get out of the town we were raised in, meet new people, go to college, etc, we become a new version of ourselves. You've made mistakes and learned from them, you've been exposed to new information and new perspectives, and opinions may change and values may change as a result. You're also less likely to put up with bullshit as you get older; the kinds of douchey things you might forgive from your friends when you are a kid are deal-breakers as an adult.

I realized that I no longer had anything in common with my old friends. But not only did I have nothing in common with them, I realized I didn't even like who they were anymore. They had become the type of person that had we met as adults, we wouldn't have become friends. They exhibited what I would call some serious character flaws.

I made a lot of friends over the years, but most of them were what I would call my "Fun Friends", meaning, they were a lot of fun to hit the night clubs with but they couldn't have an intelligent conversation to save their lives. I got to a point in my life where that just wasn't enough. The night club scene got old, and the lack of commonalities became something I couldn't ignore anymore.

Adults have more important criteria for picking friends, although oftentimes when you first meet someone you think "Wow, our personalities just clicked and he/she seems really cool", only to discover through time that they are actually incredibly annoying. What happens with lovers pretty much also happens with friends. It's the same process:
1) You meet and "click"
2) You spend lots of time together
3) You gradually see "red flags" and start to feel frustrated and annoyed
4) You finally have enough and move on

I've had to "divorce" a few friends over the years, and it was tough. Breaking up with a friend is a much more difficult process than breaking up with someone you are dating. Because dating requires romantic chemistry, you can break up with someone without having to tell them everything you hate about them. And you may actually really like the person, but you aren't feeling a romantic or sexual attraction. You can say something like, "I'm sorry, but I just don't feel anything serious for you; I'm not feeling any chemistry. You're a great guy/girl, but it's just not there for me." But with a friend, you can't say "I'm just not feeling it"! So you're left with two very unattractive options: you either tell them why you don't like them or you completely blow them off. I suppose the third option would be to do neither and hope they get the hint and dump you when they start to notice you never make plans with them anymore. Ugh.

Finding good people that you share interests with and whose personalities mesh with yours is a ridiculously difficult endeavor, and it can be just as difficult as finding "The One". 

Are You a Nerd, Too?

I've always loved books. When I was a child, I spent many hours indoors on a snowy or rainy day reading, finishing the book within a few days and eager to start the next one. My favorites offered total escapism, taking me to worlds that only exist in the imagination. I often felt like an outcast for loving to read, since I happened to have friends that hated to read and nobody else in my family spent time reading much. As a matter of fact, I remember being teased a little for it, hearing my friends or siblings referring to me as a "nerd".

As I entered my teens I gravitated toward non-fiction more, owning a ferocious appetite for learning. That lead to attempts at intellectual conversations with friends, whose responses were often to call me "weird" or tell me I "think too much".

This is nonsense, of course. I now understand that "nerd" is often used to describe anyone who actually exercises their brain instead of letting it vegetate. "Weird" can be code for "I have no interest in learning or talking about x, y, or z, so I'm going to call you weird to discourage such conversations". And "you think too much" is almost always code for "you are too smart for me and I can't contribute to this conversation."

Fictional stories gave way to sociological books about gender studies, race studies, and psychology texts about personality disorders and self-destructive tendencies. The last fictional book I read was  titled "David Meyer Is a Mother" by Gail Parent. It was a fascinating and bold story written in the 1970s about a man who grows up to be a narcissistic womanizer, only to find that the feminist movement makes him lost in the world of dating, when women no longer fall at his feet and now have lives of their own. It was written by a woman but from the male character's point of view, which intrigued me at the time (I was 16). It blew me away because it was sexually explicit and funny. But now I find truth more entertaining than fiction.

The anti-intellectualism that seems to run rampant in the U.S. needs to be squashed. Ignore the small-minded who accuse you of "elitism", because often that is just code for "I don't value science and knowledge so I will try to deflect how obvious that must be by attacking your character to get you on the defensive."

Vegan Fudgy Banana Muffins

In the mood for chocolaty banana muffins that aren't too sweet? I created these muffins when I was craving chocolate and had two bananas to use. I made them with agave syrup and molasses instead of refined white sugar, so they are less sweet and won't spike your blood sugar. For added sweetness and texture, add 1/2 cup each of chopped pecans and chocolate chips to the batter. This recipe makes a dozen muffins. Enjoy!

You will need:

1 cup bread flour
3/4 cup cake flour
1/4 cup cocoa powder
1 1/2 tsps baking soda
2 large bananas, mashed well
1/2 cup agave syrup
1/4 cup molasses
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1 tsp vanilla extract


1) Preheat oven to 350 F. Line muffin pan with paper baking cups or grease the pan.

2) Sift together all dry ingredients over parchment paper or a large bowl.

3) In medium bowl, mix together all wet ingredients with the mashed bananas.  Add dry ingredients to the wet mixture, and add nuts and chocolate chips if using. Stir just until well combined.

4) Use an ice cream scooper to fill muffin cups with batter (it makes things so much easier, and you'll get muffins of uniform size). Bake 25-30 minutes.

Tip: Spoon the flour into the measuring cup and level off the extra with a knife, instead of using the cup to scoop and shaking the extra off. This is the best way to get an accurate measure. Oh, and don't ever use a liquid measuring cup to measure dry ingredients either.

Unexpected Compassion of Sorts

 Working on a memoir, I have been reading books on creative writing. One author gave ideas on topics to write about in order to get to the good stuff and help process memories. Below is my essay based on her advice to write about a time I felt unexpected compassion.

She’s cool, I guess. I like working with her. She’s easy to talk to and smiles a lot when you tell her stories about your asshole customers on table 42. And she is quick to help you if you’re in the weeds and need someone to drop off the extra ranch for the guy who needs it for his BBQ Chicken pizza.

Sometimes I will blurt out a reason to go vegetarian when it seems relevant to a conversation or incident. I get that it’s probably annoying to some of my coworkers, but it’s imperative that the facts are heard. I’d rather be respected than liked, for the most part. If someone comments that the Sicilian pizza smells bad, I might point out that maybe it’s because it’s covered in dead body parts.

So one day I arrive to work feeling yucky and that’s super rare for me. Like, super rare. I never get sick. And she tells me “Maybe you need to eat a piece of chicken!”. Umm, no. I am not sick with something that an animal’s flesh will cure.

So one thing leads to another and in between serving our lunch rush, she hears out my reasons a vegetarian diet is superior. Okay, she’s receptive to new information. Good.

While we are refilling sodas at the drink station, I don’t mince words when detailing the horrible atrocities done to animals. “Sometimes, they are skinned and dismembered alive! And did you know the male baby chicks are crushed to death at egg farms because they are useless to egg farmers? Sick.”

Then she says to me with very sad eyes “But they do that to babies, Liz! Babies! They kill them…babies in bags…”

She is referring to abortion, of course, essentially saying 'How could you care more about cruelty to animals when there are babies being murdered?'.  I said gently, “There’s no reason you can’t care about that and animals too.”

They are not mutually exclusive. Compassion is not finite; we can feel compassion for many, many things at the same time. There’s no reason you can’t be an activist for human rights and be against animal cruelty. No reason.

But a funny thing happened when she blurted her anti-choice stance to me. I wasn’t outraged, annoyed, angry, or anything like that. I actually felt her compassion. I empathized with her view. I saw it from a different perspective, different from the one I had always seen it from before. I was used to my feminist, pro-choice view, the one that saw anti-choicers as against female empowerment, angry rants from men who want to control women and judgmental rants from women who were suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. But at that moment, I saw an anti-choice view that simply came from compassion. She was just genuinely disturbed by the whole thing.

I’m not saying I changed my mind on the issue, but I am saying that for the first time I didn’t hear just the words that usually spring from the mouths of anti-choicers, I heard her heart. Her heart. There was no anger, no judgment, just sadness. And I agree it’s a devastating thing that should be prevented, and therefore rare to occur. I believe we need to work at the roots, to prevent, not ban the procedure altogether.

What do we need to do to lower the risks and make it so the need isn’t there as often as it is? I don’t know for sure, but through research and social change, it can happen. I’m not talking about medically necessary abortions, or the ones that result from incest or rape. I’m talking about the unintended pregnancies that happen from sheer carelessness and irresponsibility.

So thank you, dear coworker, for opening my eyes to a new perspective. But I hope you take that compassion and strength and use it to work toward prevention, instead of demonizing the girls and women and trying to outlaw the procedure. Research the links and reasons why so many teenage pregnancies and unwanted pregnancies occur (from an unbiased view, as opposed to “They just need to stop being sluts and take purity pledges!” which studies have shown are actually linked to more teenage pregnancies). Become a counselor to teenagers in cities that have high rates, become a sex education teacher. I don’t know, just do more than protest at a medical clinic, because those girls and women aren’t evil, they just need help. You don't know the road they've been down.

What it's like to be Ethiopian/Norwegian/French

My mother is Ethiopian and my father is a white American of mostly Norwegian and French descent. All my life, strangers would approach me to ask what my ethnicity or race is. I sometimes enjoyed the attention, because it made me feel unique or interesting, but sometimes I found it annoying because I wondered if people needed to fit me in a box with a clear label so they could make their assumptions about who I am based on whichever ethnicity I happened to be. A great many people are overtly racist, but many people are just holding on to stereotypes because that's all they know. They are uncomfortable not being able to "read" someone just by looking at them.

One of the questions I used to get was "Why don't you look black?" It is common knowledge that darker skin tones, dark eyes and dark or curly hair are dominant genetically, as are non-Caucasian features, so most children of white and black parents (or white and Asian/Latino/etc.) wind up with the dominant features. Makes sense, since evolution would favor darker skin/eyes/hair for its protective benefits. I did have dark, curly hair growing up, but my skin was naturally light and I would easily tan in the sun. I never got sunburned. Thanks, Mom! But I looked white next to my mom, so sometimes we would get stared at wherever we went. As a teenager, I milked the attention in stores by purposely saying "Hey Mom!" loud enough to witness the confused eyes of everyone within earshot glance back and forth between me and my mother.

My mom gave me my birth certificate when I turned 18 years old, and I noticed it had "Caucasian" listed as the race/ethnicity of both my parents. I was baffled. I was born in the South in 1975. There's no way the hospital staff didn't notice the African woman with the white husband!

When I was a child I remember the first time I watched a talk show and some idiot was going on about why "the races shouldn't mix", and I was astonished to hear someone have a negative opinion. I (thankfully) did not grow up in the South, as we moved to Minnesota by the time I was 4, so I'd been spared the racist dogma up until that show. These white people were up in arms, claiming it "confuses" the children to be "mullatto"and blah, blah, blah. The only thing that was confusing to me was why they'd be angry about human beings loving each other. Ugh.

 I took some anthropology courses in college and came upon an article discussing why East Africans (Ethiopians, Somalians) tend to have "Caucasian" features. It went in depth about Ethiopian genetics and I found it difficult to understand as I don't have a degree in biology or anything like that, but it basically said something about how most Ethiopians have a high percentage of Caucasian genes linked to Norwegians, Jews, and Armenians. So does that explain my birth certificate?

I found this YouTube Video and I was like, "I'm not alone!" Other than my siblings, I've never met another person like me.

Being a person of both white and black parents has given me a unique perspective on race relations. I understand what it's like to be both white and black in America. I have witnessed overt racism firsthand with my mother, but the racism I have had to deal with was more covert. I may not be followed in a store being suspected of theft for no damn reason, but there have been many people who've started treating me differently once they find out what my ethnicity is. I've also been dealt the "race card" by black people who didn't know they were talking to someone who was half black herself. White people were the worst with the Ethiopian jokes back in the 1980s, giving me reason to think all white people were idiots at one point.

I don't consider myself white or black; I'm my own color. I'm kind of tan, but not really, unless I spend the day in the sun. My husband has said that I look white, but you can tell there's "something else" there. When I was younger, when someone asked me what my race was, I got to a point where I would ask them what they think because I was curious. When I wore my hair curly I mostly heard "Hispanic?", but as soon as I started straightening it I heard everything from Eastern European to Greek to Brazilian.

So if I ever meet you, please, for the love of all that is good in the world, if I ask you if you've ever had Ethiopian food, don't answer with "I didn't know they had food!" Yes, I have heard this.

Vegan Pumpkin Muffins with Cardamom Crumb Topping

My husband and I love Indian food. We recently got a bunch of exotic spices from the natural foods store and I felt like whipping up something sweet with the fresh cardamom pods we had sitting in our spice drawer.

These muffins are great because they aren't too sweet and are super moist. If you aren't familiar with cardamom, the best way to describe it is to say it's like a cross between star anise and clove. The aroma reminds me of a hot cup of chai tea. It smells divine, especially when freshly ground, which is what I did for this recipe. If you do buy the whole pods, just smash the shells in a bowl to release the inside seeds and discard the shells. Then grind the seeds in a spice or coffee grinder. About a tablespoon of pods should make about 2 teaspoons of ground cardamom.

Another great thing about this recipe is it doesn't require eggs or an egg substitute; the pumpkin and oil are enough to bind and create a superbly moist muffin. The crumb topping adds another dimension that elevates these muffins to superstardom ;-)

For Topping:
1/4 cup all purpose flour
1/4 cup light brown sugar
1 teaspoon ground cardamom
1 teaspoon cinnamon
3 Tablespoons vegetable oil

For Muffins:
1 3/4 cups all purpose flour
1 Tablespoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground cardamom
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup pumpkin puree
1/2 cup vanilla soy or almond milk
1/2 cup vegetable oil

1) Preheat oven to 400F. Place paper muffin cups in a 12-muffin pan.

2) Make topping in a small bowl by mixing all ingredients together well. Set aside.

3) In medium bowl, stir together the pumpkin, oil, milk, and brown sugar. Make sure to smash any big sugar lumps. Place a sifter over the bowl and sift the dry ingredients over the wet mixture. Stir just until mixed well.

4) Use a small ice cream scooper to get a uniform amount of batter into each muffin cup, then drizzle with crumb topping. Bake 20 minutes, or until tops just start to crack and look browned.

Makes 12-16 muffins.

Soft Vegan Ginger Spice Cookies with Molasses Icing

If you don't already own the cookbook Vegan With a Vengeance by Isa Chandra Moskowitz, you simply must add it to your collection. The recipe I made below was adapted from her recipe for "Sparkled Ginger Cookies". If you are in one of those moods for a soft cookie that's easy to make, look no further.

You will need:

4 T vegan white sugar
2 C all purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 1/2 teaspoons ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1/2 C vegetable oil
1/4 cup soy milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 C light brown sugar

Icing:
3 cups powdered sugar
1/4 cup hot water
2 T molasses
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1) Preheat oven to 350 F. Grease or line with parchment paper 2 cookie sheets. Pour the white sugar onto a small plate and set aside.

2) Sift together the flour, baking soda, spices, and salt over a bowl. In a separate medium-sized bowl, whisk together the brown sugar, soy milk, oil, and vanilla. Add the dry ingredients to the wet, stirring just until well incorporated.

3) Roll dough into 1" balls, place onto cookie sheet about 2" apart. Use a fork dipped into the white sugar to flatten the balls slightly. Bake 10-12 minutes. Let the cookies sit for a couple of minutes after you pull them from the oven before transferring them to a cooling rack.

4) To make the icing, whisk the powdered sugar with the hot water (add more water if it's too dry, but be careful to not make the icing too runny), then whisk in the molasses and vanilla. Use a spoon to drizzle onto cookies.

This recipe makes about 24 cookies.