OF A GOLDEN AGE

Apparently it’s food day here at Of a Golden Age.

Jeez, this New York Times article opened my eyes:

Even if home cooking is of the fried-chicken-and-mashed-potatoes variety, it rarely produces extreme obesity, said Barry Popkin, a nutritional epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “Almost any kind of cooking you can produce in a kitchen is healthier than fast food.” The decline of home cooking worldwide, he said, is an underlying cause of obesity.

“People are eating more, and more often,” Dr. Popkin said. “And the foods that they are consuming almost always replace meals cooked in a kitchen and eaten at a table.” It is difficult to quantify a decline in cooking skills, but many studies show that time in the kitchen has declined steeply since 1965, when American women spent a weekly average of 13 hours cooking. Last month the government of Britain, where obesity is spreading rapidly, passed a law requiring all secondary-school students to attend cooking classes.

These are the coffee shops I run into on a regular basis, followed by their number of locations:

Starbucks: ~10,000
Au Bon Pain: 230
Corner Bakery: 111
Cafe Descartes: 2
Julius Meinl: 2 (U.S.)
Beans and Bagels: 2

And the chains from which we frequently get lunch at work:

Subway: ~30,000 (worldwide)
Quiznos: 5,000 (U.S.)
Jimmy Johns: 754 (based in central Illinois)
Potbelly: 200 (based in Chicago)

The nonchains where we order are almost all international food (Mexican, Thai, and Chinese).

As behemoths of their industries, Starbucks and Subway both began choking themselves out of their own markets through oversaturation (see also: Krispy Kreme). The difference is that Subway is purely a franchise company so its owners have to run other franchises out of business in an overly competitive area.

Perhaps the best part of this very tall woman’s fascinating, relatable Well Blog post is learning that she, and MANY tall women who commented on the post, also got called “Jolly Green Giant” by children in school. I must have heard this three times a week. America’s children, please get more creative.

I do not believe in God or any other personal deity of organized religion. I really, absolutely do not. At the same time, I very strongly believe in everyone’s duty to keep their business to themselves in a free nation.

The fact that President Obama directly addresses believers, disbelievers, and nonbelievers together makes me happy. More than that, it does not make me angry, which probably means more in the long run. Believers and nonbelievers have to stop excluding each other.

Everyday life makes it clear that people can act morally without religion. Richard Dawkins, arguably the most annoying, axe-to-grind atheist on the planet, has not killed anyone yet and I doubt he ever will.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

There’s kind of a creepy first-season episode of 90210 where Brenda works at a crisis line and a sweet sophomore cheerleader calls repeatedly about being date raped. Earlier in the episode Brenda talks about how she wanted to join the cheerleading squad, and the implicit message is kind of like, Good thing you didn’t get what you wished for, since cheerleaders get raped!

Anyway, it soured me that the show exploited the idea of hotlines, then I saw this:

Noncrisis line lends a wise, sympathetic ear for troubled callers. This is amazing, and what a great idea.

David Wilson, a longtime veteran-to-veteran counselor, has talked many a man through many a hard time, but this conversation on Monday was a milestone. It was his maiden call as part of a new Boston institution: The city’s first help line for mentally ill callers that is staffed entirely by people who have personal experience with major psychiatric illness.

From what I’ve seen, I think the empathy angle is the most important — your average mentally well person with no past issues can’t relate, and sympathy quickly starts to sound patronizing to someone in crisis. It’s also easy for unfamiliar parties to say totally wrong things with best intentions. This is one of a handful of lasting lessons I learned during resident assistant training in college.

The other day at work my colleague Will and I spent probably ten minutes discussing empathy versus sympathy, and how in our job we have to be careful to sympathize but NOT empathize when the customer makes an irrational claim. People both rampantly fib and use selective hearing when dealing with customer service.

It’s 10:30 a.m. on a Friday, I spent the last 30 or 45 minutes walking outside, and now I’m drinking a huge bottle of water and using free wifi at the Center on Halsted. I love my new schedule.

During the daytime this place has a distinctly young-mother crowd. I learnt my lesson last time and brought headphones today, which helps me catch up on the CDs I ripped a few days ago.

Duncan Sheik had a huge hit with “Barely Breathing” way back in, I don’t know, 1996 or 1997. He’s probably cute, he’s definitely earnest, and the song burned people out the same way “Sunny Came Home” or that one Paula Cole song did. As tends to happen, it’s one of the weakest songs on the album. I’m sure people bought the album and felt disappointed because on the whole it’s very quiet. Dang, there are violins and everything.

The day you work 12 and a half hours is the day you get a headache in the morning that never goes away. Nice try, Excedrin Migraine. Thanks for nothing, both times.

This morning I brought leftover risotto from the other night for breakfast. I put in a little water, stirred it up, and heated it in the microwave for about three minutes. It came out perfect.

Speaking of 1998 . . . Oh man, Fastball’s MAJOR major hit single “The Way” has a prominent place on Now 1. It appears on their album All the Pain Money Can Buy, which I still play pretty regularly, though it reminds me bittersweetly of the time when earnest, catchy pop rock still lived on the radio.

A customer rents a piece of equipment, keeps it through the rental, and leaves it sitting in the office for the next four business days. This customer received instructions that the equipment needed to go back to FedEx. He did not call to ask questions or get help.

I sent him the email describing daily late charges and he called in to our office five minutes later.