All Stevie cared about was fat, not meat.
I learned that from Stevie's perspective the arctic char was more trouble/energy expenditure than it was worth. Yes, us urbanites drone on about salmon sushi and smoked salmon, etc.
But All Stevie cared about was blubber.
Read MoreVirtues are additive.
That is, you can take ideals like patience, charity, chastity, temperance, honesty and pile them atop each other. Having one doesn't depreciate the other.
We assume they are intrinsically good, and as far as virtues are concerned there is no such thing as too much of a good thing.
Values, on the other hand, you can’t just pile on.
Read MoreSo, if you've seen awful images and/or video of errant slaughterhouse practices (which do not represent practices I've witnessed first hand myself), no, the "shock and awe of animal mistreatment" is not one of the factors in my decision to annually give something up.
Ultimately, there is trace-element-ish crime in eating meat. As long as I elect to continue eating meat, I am responsible for this karmic-type offense. As long as I eat meat, I can't kid myself. Beef is frickin' cow. The animal is not just life support for its meat. It feels. For sure. And when it dies--I don't care how technologically sophisticated the kill room is, the animal will feel pain. The good ones make it momentary (measured in milliseconds), the bad ones botch it and often make a disgrace of the entire vocation and surely themselves.
Read MoreIn three weeks I will mark the 5th anniversary of a quirky tradition I’ve created for myself.
Every year I give up some type of food. It's not a cumulative giving up, whereby I'd slowly exhaust items permissible in my diet, never to return to them. I'm basically on an annual food rotation, cycling certain foods out during particular years.
I don't know exactly how this tradition started. That won't stop me from speculating a little later though.
In 2011, I gave up beef for a year.
Read MoreOn the other hand, the West pushed too far. The Crimean Peninsula is a historically Russian enclave; indeed, a place that even the best-known Soviet dissident, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, argued shouldn’t have been cleaved from Russia when Khrushchev did so in 1954. Ukraine is the Slavic breadbasket. It is the home of Kievan Rus for god sakes! No Russian leader could ever survive another day in office if he did not act as if Ukraine was the reddest of redlines.
Read MoreThere is no insta-fix to pleasing everyone all the time. What I'm advocating for though is the psychological stability to deal with these "aspersions" shocks. That is to absorb them, move on, and make sure that in no way will someone’s kneejerk “you are not this, you are not that” absurd identity ceiling, self-decreed upon you, impede in any way your ability to make meaning with your identity.
Read MoreWhy bothness?
Bothness is acknowledging you are unorthodox. It is having the humility to concede you are not pure, acknowledging that you are not 100%. But bothness is also knowing, feeling, and sharing as much as possible--in two domains.
Bothness isn’t just stopping at 50%. “Less than 100%” can mean 50%, surely, but it can also mean 99.999%. Those five nines mean a lot. Bothness is stretchy, real stretchy.
There are two basic rules of bothness: 1) bothness means two things, not three, not four—not everything; 2) bothness means two things that meet as two equals.
Read More"My daughter's face is 97% Korean" are Jason Calacanis' words. He is the investor/entrepreneur/blogger behind mahalo.com, launch.co and many others.
In a blog post and a series of follow up tweets on race, Jason Calacanis confronts mixed identity head on. Ostensibly talking about gender roles, and Silicon Valley social inclusion, he abruptly goes headlong into race:
"Now, there’s some truth to me not being able to speak about race. I haven’t experienced racism myself, except when standing next to my wife (who is Asian). I had no idea people were as racist toward Asians as they are — but they are. That makes me sad for my mixed-race daughter, who looks 97% Korean and 3% Irish — let alone Greek or Swedish (sorry, Dad).
But she’s going to live in the post-race world we’re shifting to. Her kids will probably share six or seven heritages — enough so that no one will matter. And that’s awesome."
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But then you see lines like the one above: "Some patrons thought the stabbing was a performance art presentation."
And you reflect. And you realize. Dang, in fact I can totally picture that-- and that is the most insane thing of all. We have such an expectation of irony such that when most of us normal, everyday folks meet face-to-face with violence we assume it's a prank.
Read MoreBut the older I get the more I gravitate to the absurd.
Indeed, it is absurd for people to tell you what you are not. To be so sure, to be so callously dogmatic about something--anything, to presume an entitlement to make decrees is absurd. I admit I can't profess I am 100%. On the other hand, no one can say I'm 0% Chinese. I'm somewhere in-between. But there is something remarkable going on here. And I don't want to miss it.
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