{divergence} Why I won’t apologize for liking Twilight

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Yes, I’m over the age of 14. In fact, many of the book’s readers who are lined up for the midnight showings of Breaking Dawn tonight aren’t 14 anymore, either. But I still have an inner 14-year-old girl, and she likes reading about sparkly vamps.

But that’s not all I like to read.

I read Neil Gaiman A LOT. I cherish Neal Stephenson (even when his Baroque Cycle took me THREE attempts to get started). I collect graphic novels and out of print comic book compendiums. I think Erik Larson is a genius writer. DH and I have somewhere north of 1,000 books in the house, most of which are crammed into Ikea Billy bookshelves in the room we’ve designated as the house library – where I even went to the trouble of finding bookshelf tag systems so that we could easily show where the biography books are shelved (just above the shelf with the erotica). In other words, I read. We all read – a lot.

So why in the blue hell am I constantly being bombarded with tweets, FB posts and other words or imagery that place reading “Twilight” books somewhere below the literary equivalent of a trashy tabloid mag?

It seems that if you read books from the “Twilight” series, then you’re a moron, yet if you read “Harry Potter” books, you’re a genius. What if you read both? (I not only believe it’s possible, but I encourage it – and we own full sets of BOTH series…strangely not having been hit by lightning yet, I think that means it’s okay to have both.)

I remember arguing a key point of “Breaking Dawn” with a friend who had his nose high in the air when mentioning “Twilight”, and he was sure that a key plot point (which I shant mention, in case there are 5 people who read this who want to remain unspoiled) was complete nonsense. When I countered with a valid, point-by-point argument that led him right to where I wanted him, when even HE admitted that Stephenie Meyer was well within her right to have written that plot point as she did and that it could be perfectly rational and reasonable to assume it possible in that ‘verse, he STILL thought “Twilight” was crap. Why? Because it’s hip to do so.

Now, is it the best writing I’ve ever read? Not all the time. There are certainly some stretches of “New Moon” where I was thinking that her editor could’ve exercised some better judgment, but if we need to point fingers at female authors given too much license, can we ever take JK Rowling to task for a few hundred too many pages in “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix”? C’mon, let’s be fair.

So, why is it that I like “Twilight”? It’s easy: it speaks to my romantic side by showing a couple that’s willing to die to be together, where love is so strong that you can’t breathe without it. It’s fantasy, and I know that, but I embrace fantasy writing (as I did seemingly a thousand years ago, when I picked up my first Piers Anthony “Xanth” book). It’s escapist. It’s a breathless beach read or a book that makes me inadvertently stay up well past my bedtime, booklight blazing away while DH sleeps next to me. It’s hopeful about romance and happiness, when the world I see outside of the book – in my reality – has a 24hr news cycle filled with pain and poverty, death and divorce, inequity and power politics. Sometimes, I just don’t want to think about all of that stuff. Sometimes, I just want to escape into a book. So why do I have to apologize TO ANYONE for wanting that book to be from the “Twilight” series?

Lastly, and most importantly: it’s a book. My first job – ever – when I was just about 14 years old, was as a page at a library near my house. I wasn’t allowed to help patrons (though I often did, on the sly); I was just supposed to shelve the books and organize the magazines. I did it with zest, loving finding out about new books, new authors, new magazines, new sources of reading material. I’m both stunned and incredibly pleased that dd was reading before she turned 5, and I beam with pride to see ds constantly want to be read to. Their appetite for books continues to grow, and I think that’s brilliant.

Literacy is a gift, and it’s one of the most important gifts there is out there. The ability to read is a skill that reaps incredible rewards; I can’t imagine going through life with only a barely functioning level of reading. You’d miss so much. And I’m a reader with a voracious appetite – I love devouring 800pp novels. Once I got sucked in by Stephenson’s Baroque cycle, I couldn’t stop, even though it took a few months of reading at night and it was something near 3,000pp. So, if I choose to read a “Twilight” book…if I choose to be literate…whose business is it to say that my reading material is of less value than whatever they think is so much better?

So, here’s the thing: the biggest difference between JK Rowling and Stephenie Meyer (aside from their net worths) is that one’s English and the other’s American. They both got people reading more. This is a good thing. They both created fantastical worlds with their own rules and their own spin on “reality”. Again, this is a good thing. Let’s hoist these creative ladies up together and stop bashing.

No one should have to apologize for liking to read, so I’m not about to start.

{divergence} We Are…PENN STATE

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For those who follow my personal Twitter and Facebook, this post is intended to provide you with some measure of explanation as to where I stand on the whole Penn State scandal. As an alumna of Penn State – especially one who was there during part of Sandusky’s tenure – I think I have to speak out.

I was a Penn State undergraduate student during the early 90’s. I was so proud to go there. It was always expected that I would go to college, and when I chose Penn State, it seemed I’d given my father the greatest gift a teenage girl can give: an incredible, storied football team. I started out as a Meteorology major, thinking I would be a tornado chaser, but I ended up switching to Political Science only one year in when it became clear that I didn’t have sufficient aptitude for Chemistry or Physics.

I learned a lot while I was at Penn State. I learned how to crank out a 30pg paper in a weekend (hint: it involves coffee, no-doz, and a metric ton of hours searching the library weeks before to prep). I learned how to make friends in a vast sea of people, where the undergraduates numbered in the tens of thousands and you could go days without seeing a familiar face. I learned how to balance work, school, and seemingly endless partying. I learned that even north of the Mason-Dixon line, in the early 1990’s, racism was still alive and well. Suffice to say: I learned a lot.

I don’t have any regrets about my time at Penn State, and though I didn’t take a lot of friends away with me (and have since rekindled a few friendships via Facebook), I am proud to be a Nittany Lion. I’m proud to “bleed blue and white”.

And then there’s the scandal related to Jerry Sandusky.

I was shocked. Horrified. Disgusted. Angry. Stupefied.

How could it be that while I was giving speeches at Take Back the Night, speaking out against rape by relating my own story of nearly being raped at a fraternity house just off campus, a monster was preying on little boys hundreds of feet away on another part of the campus? I can’t reconcile that.

Living in Massachusetts, it’s impossible to ignore the emotional stench from the Catholic Church scandal. What used to be a bad joke about priests and altar boys suddenly came to light as a horrifying reality. We learned over a period of years that this was a systemic failure – that monsters were grown and protected, sheltered and nurtured, and boys were led to emotional slaughter under the guise of organized religion. Less than 10 years later, people are now comparing Penn State to the Catholic Church. They’re not remotely comparable – Penn State seems to have experienced a systemic failure in support of one person’s terrible illness and actions, while the Catholic Church experienced a systemic failure in support of many people’s terrible illness and actions. I liken it to cancer: Penn State needs to do surgical strikes to excise specific tumors, while the Catholic Church let it go so long and so deep and so wide that it was a metastisized nightmare.

Waking to the news that Joe Paterno, our dear JoePa, was fired was unsurprising. I was willing to let him serve out the rest of the season as long as he was sure to go, but holy crap did he need to go. Anyone who knew that Sandusky raped boys and failed to report it to the police needed to go. I was cheering that Graham Spanier, the school President and – theoretically where the buck should have stopped, was also fired. He knew and he never called the police either. SHAME on both of them. SHAME on the then-graduate assistant (now assistant coach) who saw this atrocity and didn’t jump in to save the boy. Even a shout –  “HEY – WTF ARE YOU DOING?!” – could have possibly saved more children from being abused. It could have stopped sooner. Fewer people could have been hurt.

I won’t weep for Paterno, Spanier, Curley, Schultz or anyone else who loses their job in this mess. They may have done us good service before, but they hurt the institution through moral failings that let so many boys be abused by a monster. Even one is too many. (And, again, unlike the Catholic Church, the people who were involved in covering up are being fired – the Catholic Church just shuffled and moved some to Vatican City. That’s just astonishingly awful behavior.)

I don’t feel that Penn State is a loss. I have been and will continue to be an advocate for Penn State. I learned a lot there, and I know that it offers a lot as an academic institution. Things will have to change in the football program, and things will have to change about campus culture, and that’s okay. Football as God is no better than the Pope is Infallible, in my opinion: nothing made of man is perfect.

I will continue to recommend Penn State as a place to go for higher education. I urge people to consider it as a valuable and wonderful academic institution. Letting the rest of the University suffer for the failings of a small few would be a terrible shame. Penn State and its alumni need to heal. Those boys – some of whom are now men – definitely need to heal. And all of those in that healing need support, especially the victims.

For those who helped conceal, cover up and otherwise obscure the truth: they’ll find justice, one way or the other. Through guilt, incarceration, public humiliation…whatever. I won’t burn Paterno in effigy. That he failed one of the greatest moral tests is depressing, but it is what it is. We can’t turn back time, we can only move forward.

I hope Penn State can move forward from here – heal and move on. I will move on with it from a distance, continuing to support the healing and hoping that we never EVER let this happen again.

Since 1990 I have been…and always will be…PENN STATE.

CSA Cleanout Crock Pot Pork Tenderloin

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This one is a recipe of necessity: my CSA veggie boxes have taken over the fridge! The counters, the fridge…everywhere I look there are veggies that need a home: in our BELLEHS. It also didn’t help that I spent part of the evening Sunday night trying to figure out which potatoes survived the house turning into a fridge for a few days (the answer: NOT the new potatoes or the red potatoes, sadly). We also have a week coming up where generating leftovers is a bad idea.

Thus, many of the items in this dish came from our CSA veggie boxes, specifically: the onions, sweet potatoes, apples, carrots and honey. The bulk of the prep time in this dish, well – ALL of the prep time, really, came from the chopping that takes up steps 1-5, below. The rest of it is about a 5 minute process. So, if you want to do any of this the night before, I’d recommend going for it.

We have large plastic containers in our house for just such a reason – so the onions, sweet potatoes, shallots and apples were all prepped the night before. TIRED ME, I put the apples on the top of the container with the sweet potatoes. Were I being smart, the apples would’ve gone on the bottom of the container so that I could’ve just upended the thing right into the crock pot and had them in the order I wanted. (I prefer to put onions and the root veggies at the bottom of the crock pot so that they can take the bulk of the heat – they tend to stand that much better than, say, apples, which would just turn straight into applesauce.)

The carrots were cut up in the morning too, only because I was out of energy by the time I was done with a long day that I capped off with prepping onions, potatoes, shallots and apples for the next morning. And, really, if your fear is that the apples might turn brown as they oxidize: feel free to let go of that fear. First, if you have the lid on your container fairly tight, that problem may be minimized. Second, if they’re going in the crock pot, you’ll never notice whether they turned brown overnight or not.

This dish came out sweet and yummy. We didn’t pair it with a starch, but you certainly could serve this with some rice or couscous. The sauce is plentiful and light in nature, and it lends a nice sweetness to the whole thing. Because we let it go for longer than the required cook time, the pork just fell apart on us (never a bad thing), and both the sweet potatoes and apples just fell apart on the tongue. Again, this is a good problem to have.

I would say that this is a recipe that could easily be done with chicken instead of pork BUT I would then adjust the cook time down to 6-8 hrs.

 

CSA Cleanout Crock Pot Pork Tenderloin

Porktastic!

Prep Time: 30-40 min
Cooking Time: 8-10 hrs on LOW
Serves: 4

Ingredients
2 small (or 1 large) yellow onions
2 large sweet potatoes
1 shallot
5 medium empire apples
6 medium/large carrots
1-1/2 lbs pork tenderloin
14-1/2 oz can low-sodium chicken broth
1 cup apple juice
2 Tb cider vinegar
2 Tb wildflower honey
1 Tb brown sugar

Make it Happen
1. Peel and thinly slice the onion(s); place in the bottom of a 5qt oval crock pot in a single layer. They should cover the majority of the bottom of the crock pot.

2. Wash and chop the sweet potatoes into pieces no more than about 1/2″ thick and 1″ wide. Place the sweet potatoes in the crock pot.

3. Peel and mince the shallot. Sprinkle about one-third of the shallot on top of the sweet potatoes.

4. Peel the carrots and remove the ends; chop into small rounds, no more than about 1/3″ thick. Place in the crock pot. Sprinkle about one-third of the shallots on top of the carrots.

5. Wash the apples; slice in half, remove the core and then cut the apples into roughly 12 slices. Place the apples in the crock pot; sprinkle the remaining shallots on top of the apples.

6. Place the pork tenderloin on top of the apples. Pour the broth on top of the tenderloin and pour around it, on top of the apples and veggies.

7. In a measuring cup, pour the apple juice and the cider vinegar; pour this combination on top of the tenderloin and then around it, on top of the apples and veggies.

8. Drizzle the honey on top of the tenderloin, using either the flat of the spoon or a brush to coat the top of the tenderloin evenly with the honey.

9. Sprinkle brown sugar on top of the tenderloin.

10. Cover and cook on LOW for 8-10 hrs.

11. Remove pork from crock pot and cut into 1/2″ thick pieces before serving with veggies, apples & sauce.