The Weekly Meat

How to Travel with Your Significant Other and Not Break Up

Editorial Note: This post was co-written with my wife, AKL.

Please — before it’s too late — reconsider that romantic getaway you’ve been planning.

Traveling is devastating for relationships. If you love each other, stay home. Even perfectly functional, happy relationships can be ruined by the wedge issues travel creates for couples. Long-festering personality quirks can suddenly look like deal-breaking character flaws in the bright light of the Caribbean. Or the dingy light of a hotel bar.

We assure you, you’ll be much happier just staying at home and watching other people break up on TV.

Now, if you absolutely must leave home, please take with you our five time-tested survival techniques:

Rule #1: Prepare.

Seasoned Euro-traveler Ben Franklin said, “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” So prepare. Know your itinerary, bring your passport, extra socks, Scooby Snacks with which you can bribe your significant other…. Every trip has its hassles, and the fewer hassles you have, the fewer passive-aggressive “discussions” you’ll have about those hassles.

Also, buy good maps. Nothing can create tension faster than a stupid argument over how to find some hard-to-find landmark.

Rule #2: Avoid landmarks.

Landmarks are public places where couples are meant to have “moments.” Do not underestimate the importance of these moments. Try to gauge — or even (gasp!) ask — what the expected highlights of the trip are for your partner. And then try very hard not to screw up those highlights.

There’s a time and a place for everything, and the time and place for a state of the union chat is not at the Louvre or on the observation deck of the Eiffel Tower.

In fact, guys, do not under any circumstances go to Paris. Paris is like a wedding (or a funeral); you will never be forgiven for screwing up Paris.

Rule #3: Don’t go to bed angry.

This seems simple, but it’s not. Sort out little issues as they pop up during the day rather than giving them a chance to boil over when you’re tired and belligerent with mini-bar purchases.

We call this the “Brady Bunch rule.” No matter how bad things got for the Brady family — be it a surfing accident, a broken nose, or the everyday indignities of being the middle child (“Marcia! Marcia! Marcia!”) — by the end of the episode, all had been worked out and even Jan was happy again. Make bedtime the end of any “episodes.”

Rule #4: You’re not connected at the hip.

If you love art and are dying to see Florence’s Uffizi Gallery, but your partner can’t tell a Giotto from a grotto, ditch them for the day. You’ll see and do things on your own that you wouldn’t together (CAUTION! Skip this rule when in Vegas!) and even have something to talk about when you meet up later.

Being apart can also help you put your relationship in perspective. Are you enjoying yourself? Is this really a person with whom you could see yourself growing old? Living without? Is that hot bartender really giving you the eye?

Rule #5: The grass is never greener.

On every trip, you will meet exactly one person with whom you would fall madly in love, if not for your significant other. Do not fall in love with this new person.

It will be difficult. You will meet this person on a plane, or a bus, or a trek, or in a bar, or through a friend. The man or woman will come from Australia, or Iceland — an island country full of outgoing people with fabulous hair and supermodel cheekbones. They will be mysterious and have an interesting name and some odd talent. Their name will be Jada or Sven, and they’ll play bass for Bjork. You’ll have fantasies about living in their perfect world, and having transcendent sex and uncomplicated communication.

Remember, like internet Vi@gra! or 99-cent shrimp cocktail, if it looks too good to be true, it is.

Of course, if none of this helps and traveling does destroy your relationship and you ultimately find yourself single, well don’t just sit there and think, “They told me so,” get off your couch and see the world. You can start with Australia or Iceland.

Praised Vegetables

There has been much great writing lately about the local food movement and the societal evils of number two corn. During the summer, you can't swing a hoe without bumping up against odes to local heirloom tomatoes (and, as my mom likes to say, "I don't disagree"). But some veggies get short shrift. Yes, the blog is called The Weekly Meat, but I'd like to praise the orange root veggie we grow  from seed in our modest middle-urban backyard, because the difference between a fresh local carrot and the orange imposters we find in our grocer's produce aisle is like the difference between a Santarpio's grilled sausage pizza, and, well, Wonder bread with a slice of "pasteurized process cheese food product" on it.

Our carrots taste like carrots were meant to — sweet and crisp, but also rooty and earthy, with a hint of bitterness toward the top. Bagged, shipped-cross-country grocery store carrots taste like the idea of a carrot. They have the texture but not the soul.

This is all somewhat new to me. I'll admit to not fully appreciating (okay, not liking) too much in the way of vegetables until well into my sideburns years. Growing up, I made my mom's compulsory nightly iceberg lettuce salad palatable by drizzling over it not dressing but applesauce. But at some point (read: college), as my mind expanded, my stomach — realizing it could not remain trapped in puberty forever — grew up too.

I'm not a veggie freak, but I am a food freak, and these days (perusals of a certain daily specials menu aside) it's tough for me to eat well without also eating right. Not just well-balanced meals, but locally-grown, mostly in-season meals.

The following recipe* works just fine w/store-bought everything — hell, give it a shot today if you need a quick starter — but try it sometime with real carrots, local to your yard or a nearby farm. You won't be able to ignore the difference.

BK's Quick Carrot Soup

1 lb carrots, cut into large chunks
1 onion, chopped
1 clove garlic (~Tblsp), chopped
1/2" nub of fresh ginger (~tsp), chopped
1 qt. chix stock (homemade or boxed)
1 dollop light sour cream (~1/3 C)
salt/pepper to taste
spice to taste (pinch of cumin or curry if you go in for that sort of thing)
fresh chive if you've got it

1. Add a splash of olive earl to a (>3 qt) soup pot and saute the onion for a few minutes. Add garlic and ginger and continue sauteeing for another minute or so. Then add carrots, and saute for ~5 minutes, stirring occasionally.

2. Add stock to the pot, cover, and bring to a boil. Turn down the heat, and let simmer for 45 minutes to an hour (until the carrots are soft, but not mush).

3. In two batches, transfer the contents to a blender, add a dollop of sour cream, and blend until the soup is pureed. Add salt/pepper to taste, pinch of cumin or whatever tilts your kilt.

4. Top soup w/fresh cut chives if you've got em, and eat.

Serves 4

* I'm really not big on writing down (or following) recipes, so forgive me if this seems roughly remembered (it is).

Corporate Grass Roots

Two years ago, a co-worker brought me a draft of a letter to the Senior VPs of the large corporation for which we work in the cubicled salt mines. The letter was a plea for the cause of energy conservation within the company. We’re a multinational Silicon Valley software company of roughly 5,000; surely, we could be doing something — anything — to green up.

We cranked out a final copy of the letter and began asking colleagues to co-sign with us. It felt somewhat revolutionary (Sure, we work for The Man, and sure, he checks our email and peeks in our web browsing, but we're free-thinking individuals, dammit, not mindless proles...); we were earnest and enthusiastic and ready to take on the big guns with our well-honed rhetoric.

Thankfully, before we dashed off the letter to corporate, the local facilities manager — a seasoned DC lobbyist, and all for our cause — asked us to reconsider our actions. Somewhat chastened at first, we did, and instead wisely decided to form a small task force to see what we could do locally, with the long-range plan of using our presumed success as a proof of concept to sell the conservation argument up the ladder to corporate.

Even as I get older and  — ahem — more respectable, it bores me to do things slowly and methodically, but ultimately, we made the right choice. Sure, I'd love to see change happen through punk rock, bold art, and strong words, but change doesn't happen overnight, and no one likes to be shown up — especially those with initials in their job titles — and the letter, signed by 50 employees might have seemed a bit mutinous to our paycheck-endorsers. Sometimes, it’s simply not necessary to fight corporate city hall loudly, as morally empowering as it might feel at the time. In fact, if we had, we might have more easily forgotten our cause after getting a lip service response. Instead, we now have a hugely successful locally-grown initiative that is indeed the model of conservation we’d hoped for.

Thanks to buy-in from the site manager, and local facilities, IT, and business unit group heads, as well as excellent employee support, the initiative within months reached our initial goal of reducing the amount of electricity our site uses by 100,000 kilowatt hours (kW h), annualized, and we have since saved another 50,000 kW h per year.

At our site of approximately 300 employees, computers outnumber people nearly five to one, so clearly there was some (as the suits like to say) “low-hanging fruit” to be had. Thus, our biggest gains have been made not by changing expensive building systems like HV/AC, but by improving inefficiencies in our computing operations. We’ve given away unused equipment, shut down rarely-used equipment, set machines to power-savings mode, and asked fellow employees to forgo power-draining "screen savers" (that’s right, kids, it takes a lot of CPU power to draw those pretty multicolor 3D pipe designs and such) in favor of turning off their monitors when they leave for the night. Electricity rates vary, so cost savings are somewhat tough to estimate (certainly over $20,000 per year though), but in terms of usage, our simple housekeeping measures have so far conserved enough energy to power 18 average New England homes, yearly.

What’s more, we haven’t spent any corporate funds to achieve our substantial savings. We even convinced our vending machine contractor to install on our soda machines energy miser sensors, which power up a machine only when they detect motion (i.e., a customer), while maintaining beverage temperature as necessary.

In addition, we’ve greatly changed the way that we use the computing power we do have — not only centralizing data storage on robust servers, but sharing their processing power as well. We then access those servers not with power-hungry tower-style computers, but with laptops which, on the average, use one-quarter the power of most bigger, desktop CPUs.

We’ve continued to maintain, not increase, our energy usage, and to share information with other sites and encourage them to set up similar local initiatives, and have slowly — and successfully — been pushing energy awareness and savings up the chain of command. We’ve even been cited positively by corporate executive staff, when asked what we as a company are doing to green up.

Not bad for a few local folks with a chip on their collective shoulder and a hopeful eye toward change. Our grass-roots solution demanded that we change first — not simply talk the talk of revolution — and it ultimately proved far more effective than our initial demand for that same change in corporate. Our well-written and thoughtful letter to corporate would have been, essentially, an op-ed piece without a newspaper to print it and only a very small audience to read it.

The tendency in most large corporations is toward apathy and wastefulness, but it needn’t be. Sure, we’re all more thrifty at home than at work, but what a simple thing it is to turn off the lights when you're done in the copy room, or to police up computers left on in empty cubes. It’s no skin off my nose, and though I’d rather see executive pay come back in line with say, reality, wastefulness breeds more wastefulness, and it’d be nice if the suits had fewer excuses when it’s time for raises to be handed down to those of us toiling in the mines.

Kitties and Dogs 2: Of Women and Socks

With the addition of two baby girls in the past two years, I've been coming to terms with the suddenly elevated levels of estrogen in the house. We have a 3-month-old, and her 22-month-old sister, RK — who is currently exhibiting her newfound "big girl" maturity by breastfeeding her dolls. I suppose I can turn to our boy cats for a little male bonding, but well, they're cats.

And then there is RK's exponentially expanding vocabulary. For starters, we're having a risqué pronunciation issue. Apparently, the "s" sound is a difficult one for the young palate to make. Most toddlers substitute a "t" sound, as RK does for the word "see," which becomes "tee." But, tee, here's the rub: it should follow that those cotton or wool things one wears under one's shoes would be "tocks." Not so for young RK — who, instead, begins that word with a hard "c."

[S]ock. As in adult male fowl, to set a trigger for firing, etc. It's also, mind you, the way she pronounces the following similar words: clock, quack, cluck, truck.

The thing of it is, when you have a vocabulary of maybe two hundred words, and your existence revolves around eating, sleeping, pooping, and getting dressed, you tend to lean heavily on a word like sock. It, "hat," "mitten," and "shoe" — which she somehow pronounces infinitely better than sock — are the only clothing words in her permanent lexicon. So as she happily sifts through the clean laundry trying to match up socks in our house of four bi-peds, she'll say things like, "Daddy [s]ock. Mommy [s]ock. Baby [s]ock."

I'm not sure how the ubiquitous parenting for dummies sort of books tell you to handle these "little kids say the darndest things" moments, but we live in Boston, and her pronunciation gives entirely new meaning to a certain ubiquitous local world champion baseball team. (She, of course pronounces "red" just fine.) In other instances, whether in public or at home, I like to occasionally humor young RK by pronouncing words the same way she does. So, instead of saying "more," we say "mao," and "dieboo" instead of "diaper." Red [S]ox? Not so much.

And this [s]ock business only serves to underscore the fact that among the words one is curious to learn at that age is — well — what to call the thing between one's legs.

With all due respect to Eve Ensler, vagina's just not a word I use a lot. OK, ever. Rather — with heartfelt thanks to an ex-girlfriend and her sister — I prefer the term they used growing up: wahine. It's Hawaiian for woman, which is a nice, strong image, it rolls smoothly off the tongue, and well, it's not vagina. In any case, it's what I call it. Even to my wife. Who rolls her eyes in a way remarkably similar to my own when she refers to my hockey socks as leg warmers.

I realize vagina’s a proper medical term and all, but so is “bowel movement” and doctors don't even use that anymore. (It’s as if there was some sort of medical Vatican II a few years ago wherein it was decided that “poop” would heretofore be the officially-sanctioned term of record.)

Mind you, when I get out of the shower and RK points inquiringly to my naked midsection, I say, "That's right, daddy has a penis, because daddy's a boy. But you and mommy and your sister are girls, so you have a wahine." Double standard? Yes. Do I care? No.

Sorry, RK- you and your mom and baby sister can have your little Our Bodies Ourselves rallies to your hearts' delight as you grow older. Me, well, I do have the cats on my side. C'mon boys, join me: have a couple beers in the old sweat lodge, get a little drum circle together, scratch yourselves. Rock out with your sock out!

The Truth about Kitties and Dogs

The problem with cats sometimes is that, well, they’re not dogs. A few weeks back, I called our cats so they’d come downstairs in the way a dog might. Nothing happened. I called again. Nothing. I looked at my wife, AKL, who said, “You have to call them in a higher voice — like I do — and you have to say, “Here, kitty kitty kitties….” She does so. And it works.

My problem with this is twofold: I refuse to use the “here, kitty” voice; and, well, I refuse to say the word “kitty.”

Over our six years of marriage, I’ve noticed that, though AKL and I ostensibly communicate well and are both native English speakers, we have different lexicons. There are words that she, as a woman, uses that I simply cannot. I’m not talking about sex-organ–specific slang or bodily function sorts of words that make some uneasy, I’m talking about everyday English.

In addition to kitties, there exist furry little bushy-tailed animals that hop around. I would call those creatures rabbits. I’ve always called them rabbits. AKL calls them bunnies. (Note: She also sometimes playfully calls our “kitties” bunnies. But I digress.) I would say I’m shorter than Shaquille O’Neal; Abby would say I’m littler. I have a stomach; she has a tummy.

AKL wears tops, I wear shirts. She wears jammies to bed, I wear boxers. No offense to the more fashionable guys out there, but men wear clothes, not outfits. And those things that professional sports teams wear when playing a game — they are not outfits either, they’re uniforms.

I’ve played ice hockey with cracked ribs. I’ve gone solo camping miles from civilization. I’ve done a gut rehab on our kitchen. It’s not that I’m not secure enough in my manhood to use these female-centric words, it’s just that — well — okay, maybe in part it is that I’m not secure enough in my manhood.

For bunnies to exist in my world would be to overturn too much I learned about living in the world as a man. The list of movies that can make me cry may start and end with Brian’s Song. Okay, maybe I misted up a bit when the Red Sox won it all in '04 — but not in a bunnies sort of way.

Still, I’m not suggesting that I’m a stereotypical guy. I grew up with a sister and female cousins, and I’m very sensitive — I own clogs for god’s sake. A friend’s wife even likes to suggest that he and I fall into a small sect of men who make great husbands because we’re “just gay enough.” Meaning, we cook better than our wives, dress ourselves well, and can use big words during a football game despite the fact that we’re straight. But still, that Y chromosome prevents Girl Words from even entering my brain, let alone escaping my mouth.

I should mention here, too, that AKL is by no means a girly-girl. She doesn’t wear makeup, hates perfumy smells, understands the rules of all major sports, and can bait her own fishing hooks.

But she’ll refer to my hockey socks as leg warmers. And when pressed, she might admit her favorite thing is cuddling.

So when your husband or wife, or sister, or mother, or whomever, claims that sometimes it’s like the two or you are speaking different languages, well, maybe there’s something to it.

I have friends up in Montreal whose colloquial Quebecois French is a different sort from the type I learned back in high school. So we communicate in a halting patois that is neither English nor French. Alcohol generally helps our understanding, but certain concepts are invariably beyond simple translation.

Similarly, the gendered lexicon surely limits us at times. It can be frustrating, but ultimately maybe it’s for the best. Let AKL have her secret world of kittycats and bunnies. Some things are innate — where I hear song lyrics, she hears something more like the sound made by Charlie Brown’s teacher — and it’s our differences, rather than our common ground, that give us things to laugh about.

If we can’t change our spots, I suppose the cats can’t either. I might not be able to teach them to come running when I call “C’mon, boys” — but they sure do jump to the sound of their food cans being opened.