From the Washington Post: Donald Trump is holding a casting call.  He's seeking 'the look.'
​Got facial hair?  Inconvenient melanin?  Are you an unattractive woman?  You probably won't get cast in Donald Trump's D.C. reality show.

From the Root: Woman reports white man choked her son; Fort Worth, Texas police assault, arrest her instead
​Nobody died, but this video needs to be seen widely.  Warning: it's hard to watch, between the white police officer stonewalling the mother of the victim, the same man ultimately tasing her and throwing her to the ground and arresting her teenaged daughter as well, and the girl shooting the video (another family member, I believe) communicating her fear and outrage by screaming nonstop abuse.  All because the mother tried to report a white neighbor for physically disciplining/assaulting her little boy in her absence.

It is a crazy time.  Anyone else having trouble concentrating on basic tasks?  For instance, my urogynecologist told me I should do Kegel exercises while I brush my teeth, and my dental hygienist told me I really should be brushing my teeth for 3 minutes at a time because I have plaque, and trying to do both these things at once (Kegel exercises plus dental thoroughness) was already a strain on my limited powers of concentration even before Trump got elected.  Now you can just forget about any of these things getting done right, because with my mouth full of toothpaste I am thinking about the electoral college and casual racism and Syria.  Wait, I forgot to squeeze!  

You'd think that, with all these things on our collective minds, it would make it easier to write, but instead it makes it harder.  The sheer volume of thought and emotion and alarming information slamming in from the public sphere, in conjunction with whatever we've got going on privately, is a lot to sift through.  I am watching friends tune in and out again.  In, because there is the illusion that maybe vigilance will keep us safe.  Out, because they are swiftly overwhelmed by what feels sometimes like a cloud of flying shrapnel.  It is unclear what we can do to save ourselves when the answer seems to be, always, "everything."

​So intimidating; thankfully there are tens of millions of us.

Meanwhile, while apparently not one of those tens of millions are looking, somebody sneaks into the public park and cuts down the old-growth cedar tree you loved.

On Monday night, I went to a thing.  It was called "Breaking Bread Together," or rather we called it that, having just invented it.  Basically, it was an activist potluck.  Because it was held in somebody's living room, it was limited to a group of 18 people-- the first 18 to show enthusiasm, not the most important 18 people in my very activist town, although there was a city councilman there in regular-guy mode.  We brought soup and bread and vegetables and cookies and cakes.  Two different people brought roasted cauliflower with pomegranate seeds.  There weren't enough dishes to have both a bowl and a plate, or both a fork and a spoon, so I filled my little soup bowl repeatedly with different things and ate brussels sprouts and roasted cauliflower hungrily with my spoon.  We sat on chairs or on the floor, in a wide circle around this guy's living room coffee table, and formally introduced ourselves one at a time, and talked about what was important to us and how we were feeling that night, Dec. 19, the day the electors voted for Donald Trump as President of the United States.  We also tried to put together some kind of loose viral model for a series of similar dinners to be held by all of us, and others we would invite and recruit, all over our community.​

By far the most accessed article on this website is the post Eggplant Pros & Cons, written during a period when I was consuming an unpresidented amount of eggplant and began to be worried about toxicity.  As an article, it is boring, and I remember very little of the information contained therein.  Nevertheless it receives approximately 17 times more traffic than any other post.  I thought, if I were to give the Internet what it apparently wants, I would stock my site full of cost-benefit analyses of various foodstuffs, stick some clickbait ads on there, and wait for the magic to happen.  Except that this sounds like possibly the most tedious job in the world, and I could probably still make more money waiting tables.

Pros & Cons inspiration did not strike again until the day when I was buying a half-gallon of Silk unsweetened cashew milk for my lactose-intolerant husband, and the bearded stranger in front of me in the Co-op checkout line volunteered that he never eats cashews because of the toxicity.  A public service announcement, I guess.  Even while I felt scornful about his food-paranoia, his warning nagged at me.  I was trying to take care of my husband's health by reducing his obviously inflammatory milk consumption; what if, instead, I was slowly poisoning him with a concentrated brew of expressed cashew toxins?

Two or three months passed during which I continued to buy cashew milk for my husband, did no further research, and witnessed the sudden downfall of our democracy.

​This morning-- a Saturday morning in December, just before the electoral college ratifies the unthinkable-- I sat with my husband, eating a breakfast of bacon & eggs, toast and clementines, and drinking hot chocolate made with cashew milk.  Please be advised: hot chocolate is NOT as good with cashew milk, though I have made it with almond milk and that is fine.  For the first time, I thought to tell my husband of the bearded man's earnest warning.  My husband scoffed.  After all, he smokes, doesn't exercise, and has an unhealthy devotion to cheeseburgers.  Is it really likely that cashew milk will take him down?

I don't know.  So here goes:

​Cashew milk (the unsweetened kind), compared to cow's milk, is low in calories, fat and sugar, but also low in protein.  It also has a lot of Vitamin E.  Raw cashews are unsafe to eat due to a chemical called urushiol-- also found in poison ivy-- which can cause skin rashes and is toxic if ingested.  However, the cashews sold in stores as "raw" cashews are actually steamed, rendering them edible.  Silk cashew milk is made from cashews which are roasted before being ground and used to make "milk," so overdosing on urushiol is a non-issue.

Beyond personal health, however, the exposure to urushiol inherent in cashew harvest and processing means that excessive cashew consumption may have ethical repercussions, as described in The Telegraph:

So there's that.  I can't determine where Silk's cashews are sourced (notably absent from their FAQs, which provide this information re: soybeans and almonds).  I would normally just give up, but in this new age of activism it occurred to me that I could ask them, so I wrote to inquire.  Will let you know if they answer. [UPDATE: Silk says that their cashews come from "Africa, Brazil and Vietnam."]

Now that we have concluded that cashews are safe, if possibly unethical, to eat, I have a few words about another current American dietary trend, our toxic friend Donald J. Trump.

An asshat, yes, you say, but a dietary trend?  What do you mean?

Just what I say.  After the election, we spoke of five stages of grief.  But, as far as I can currently tell, there have been only two stages of eating.  1) 48 hours or so (your experience may vary) of total loss of appetite, during which we had to remind one another to drink water and nobody cared if they had a splitting headache or were subsisting on a couple of handfuls of Ritz crackers.  2) A sustained, not-yet-over period of frantic stress-eating, legitimized widely by Anne Lamott confessing the same on Facebook, but shared by many, characterized by a massive intake of carbs (and sometimes alcohol) and a sudden absence of regard for one's own health or even vanity.

At some point it occurred to me to drink some bourbon, and it was like the best thing I had ever tasted.

The "Trump 10" is apparently a real thing.

And it's not just quantity, it's quality too.  I don't feel like cooking.  While broccoli still tastes great when it magically appears on my plate, I have stopped bothering to serve a salad with my pasta.  Too much trouble, and who cares, really?  We've taken to eating frozen burritos, frozen vegetables, accidentally-vegan macaroni-and-"cheese" out of a box.  I buy candy, and chips, and donuts.  This cannot be good for me, or us, or the world.  Also, I don't want to become a drunk.  

This is true toxicity, this hopelessness and insecurity and downright fear and dread that we feel.  The unhealth of Trump's own food choices has somehow become contagious, even while all his other choices are ones we repudiate.  At this rate, on January 21, the date of the Women's March, a sea of bloated, sad faces will fill the streets of Washington D.C., and we will march uncomfortably in our tight pants.

I have no solution to this.  There are so few ways to make myself feel better these days, so few routes to pleasure-- which is different from happiness, now inaccessible.  Pizza is accessible.

Tonight my husband and I will go to the bad diner.  This is the one we choose when we're feeling low-energy, like after a long, horrible weekend day at work, or when we are sick or our cat has died.  The food is unreliable and the coffee weak, but there is absolutely no pressure there.  You can eat with your coat on if you're feeling chilled, or hunch over the table with eyes closed; the waitresses know us.  My husband can get a cheeseburger.  

Someday I hope we are well again.

​