Last week I spoke with a gentleman with a gruff, slightly back-country drawl. “Did I tell you the reason for my being pro-choice?” he asked. I wonder if he knew that I had never called him before, that phone callers come and go at non-profits, and we absolutely never write down what people say or share it in any way. Although, clearly, I think someone should.

“There was a young girl and she bled to death. She was young—between high school and college. Well, she needed help, and ending a pregnancy had to be completely secret. She went to a doctor who performed a surgery on her in the back of an old milk truck. Well, something went wrong…she started bleeding too much. She bled too much, she bled to death. So the guy took her to the dump and just left her body there.

“I was a young man then. I had gathered up a bunch of trash to take to the dump, put it in my old pickup truck to take to the dump. And I’ll never forget it because I showed up there to drop off the garbage and they were cleaning up the crime scene. I saw a chalk outline of her body.”

He remained very quiet as he told the story, and I could hear pain in his voice, even recollecting a story that had to be over 40 years old. I did not cry on the phone with this man, although it was hard not to. I did not question the truth of his statements, or try to piece together the leaps in his storytelling, although I had about a thousand questions. Later, while researching abortion tourism, I stumbled on the story of Raisa Trytiak, a 24 year-old Seattleite, who was strangled and left in a dump in 1967 following a botched abortion. I was unable to find any primary source documents on this case, so I can’t confirm if this is the same story or a different case. But the case of Raisa Trytiak has been cited, among a few other heavily reported stories, as leading to Referendum 20, which solidified abortion up to four months in Washington State law.

An 1970 article in the Spokesman-Review

I am always surprised when men give a shit about women’s reproductive freedom.  There are men who would force a doctor to probe my body, make it impossible for me to buy safe birth control that is distributed in other countries over the counter, and otherwise make it unsafe for me to live in my own body. Then there are men who think they are allies to women, but refuse to be useful, to speak or act as an ally to women in any meaningful way. Once, a man I called (who had made a donation to the organization in the past) told me that he would leave the defense of abortion rights to the ladies. Would he call his state senator? “I just don’t have a dog in this fight,” he told me. (The battle for abortion rights is a dog fight? Don’t make me bitch-slap you.) It’s a failing of my own internalized patriarchal thinking that all men are either ignorant of or hostile to issues of reproductive justice. But that belief is steadily eroded by the deep empathy that men feel for the crisis of women’s health in the United States today. Men need to share their memories of what it was like before abortion was legal. And they need to reevaluate just whose fight this is.

“All children should be loved,” the guy on the phone told me. “No one is pro-abortion. Abortion should be safe, legal, and rare,” he said, “And it’s men that want to put these restrictions on women’s bodies. It’s not your body.”

I talked to a woman last night from the Seattle area about the price of abortion in the late 1960s. She told me, “My girlfriend had to fly to Japan to get an abortion. There was a travel agency in Seattle that would set you up for a trip to Tokyo, and take care of everything for you. Not many people could afford to fly across the world for an abortion. Luckily, we worked at an airline. So she got a discount on the fare.”

I have heard from other women who were around at the time that there were such travel agencies in Seattle. According to HistoryLink, one agency charged $1,000 for a four-day trip to Tokyo, which included one day of siteseeing.

My second-wave sister was frank with me, ”Do women of the younger generation know why this is important? Do women even know how bad it was before Roe? I look around and I worry that no one is going to pick up this banner when we’re gone.”

I told her about the advocacy groups that I have organized with in Seattle. I told her about Seattle Clinic Defense, and the heightened urgency young women feel after witnessing such bold misogyny from campaigning politicians in the 2012 elections. The day we spoke was six days after North Dakota passed a ban on abortion after six weeks. Women are fucking angry, I told her.

And abortion tourism goes on today, 30 years after Roe, in every state where there are undue restrictions on choice. Women with cash, a way to get around, and a place to crash are not having fewer abortions in light of draconian restrictions. It’s those women who don’t have cash, who don’t get the employee discount on air fare, who end up having fewer abortions.

In Idaho, 40 percent of abortions are performed out of state. Spokane, with a Planned Parenthood, welcomes many of those women forced to travel.

In New York City, America’s abortion capitol, families are opening up their doors to host women seeking late-term abortions. I proposed such an idea, a Couchsurfing setup for pregnant women, at the Northwest Reproductive Justice Summit. Some sisters let me know that such a thing exists in Spokane. I am happy to hear it, but when I googled, nothing remotely related came up. How the hell would a woman find someone to host her during her clinic visit? I searched for abortion homestays, abortion couchsurfing, abortion resources. I think most women would have a hard time finding a place to stay using the Internet as their main research method.

Any woman who needs an abortion in Seattle is more than welcome to stay with me and Barthes. I’m ready to pick up the banner, lay out the bedsheets, phone bank, and blockade pickets for reproductive justice. So yes, sister, third wavers know how important this is. We know that for some women, it’s like Roe never happened.

6.5 oz green beans (that’s just how many fit in my pint jar)
1 clove garlic, peeled, halved
2 dried red chilis (I squeezed out like half of the seeds inside because I worried that after a week they’d be so spicy I wouldn’t be able to eat them)
a pinch of whole multicolored peppercorns

brine:
1/3 c water
1/3 c white vinegar
1/3 c apple cider vinegar
2 tsp sea salt
1/2 tsp Chinese mustard

Trim the edges off the green beans so they fit in the jar. It’s awfully helpful to have a grid on your cutting board so you don’t cut too much and waste even a millimeter of crunchy legume goodness, or legoomness, as I call it.

Pack ‘em up in the jar with the garlic, pepper and peppercorns.

In a measuring cup, dissolve the salt in the liquids. Pour over the green beans and wait at least 2 days. And then find out if you need more red peppers or even that dill.

A rotating stock of quick pickles are replacing fresh veggies for me. They’re great because they keep veggies as crisp and vitamin-rich as when they were fresh, and they’re as tasty 30 minutes after pickling as they are 3 weeks after pickling. Not that they ever last that long.

I eat these pickles pretty much every day. I put them on Vietnamese-inspired tofu or salad dishes, ploughman’s sandwiches with cheddar and hummus and red onion, I LOVE them on Mexican-inspired food (jicama is known as Mexican potato). It’s only appropriate, since these are inspired by a Vietnamese pickle, do chua. I think (although I’ve never been to there) that quick pickles, in Asia, are like ketchup or syrup here, you just gotta put that on everything. Do chua is usually made with daikon, and the bite of the radish is perfect to balance out the sweetness of carrot. But jicama has this freshy texture, like apple slices, and absorbs all the tang of the vinegar for a flavor that has all the acid of something tossed in salad dressing, except without soggying up the place and wilting everything nearby. Also, jicama is good in like a million things, so I prefer to keep it around rather than daikon (which is probably good in a million things but I do not know what they are).

Makes one quart jar and one pint jar (perfect for sharing with a friend)
1 lb jicama (this is usually half of a normal size jicama)
12 oz carrots (this is a little less than a 1:1 ratio)
2 teaspoons salt
1/2 cup (this is a generous amount of sugar, I use a little less) and 2 teaspoons sugar
1 cup white vinegar
1/4 cup rice vinegar
1 cup warm water
1/2 teaspoon powdered ginger

Cut the jicama and carrots into matchsticks of matching length and thickness. Too thick will make them not pickley and too thin will make them break and not be crispy.

In a bowl, sprinkle the salt and 2 teaspoons of the sugar over the veggies. Very gently, so as not too snap the matchsticks, rub the veggies. As they get slicker and slimier, you can afford to manhandle them a bit.

Do this until the veggies have given up lots of water, and until they bend—but not break— as shown in the picture.

Rinse them under cold water.

Meanwhile, add the liquids to a graduated measuring cup or pitcher. Add the 1/2 cup of sugar and ginger and swirl until it’s all dissolved.

Stuff veggies into jars and pour liquid to cover, up to 1/4 inch from the top of the jar.

Welcome them to the pickle shelf.

Scratchy-scratch

I was inspired by this designsponge project to build a cat scratch pad. Using four medium corrugated cardboard boxes leftover from a friend’s move, this project took me about six hours to put together. I think this was in part because I never read directions, so I spent a fair amount of time figuring out the most efficient way to cut the cardboard strips (and since you’re such a dedicated reader, I’ll save you some time). It takes a lot of strength to do this project in a heart shape because the cardboard wants to unravel and you have to wrap it around itself and hold it in place until it submits.

You will need:
cardboard boxes
hot glue gun (I used about a dozen glue sticks)
exacto knife
cutting mat helps a great deal

3. Make the basic elements of a heart: two circles and a slightly acute isosceles triangle. You can begin hot-gluing right away, or you can mock up the elements using rubber bands to make sure they match in size.

4. Glue that stuff together tight.

If your cat doesn’t realize that it’s for him, sprinkle catnip in between the layers.

Look the mat is about a foot and a half wide, but that cat is HUGE

Dir. P.J. Hogan

106 minutes

Muriel is that girl who dances without moving her arms, who listens to pop songs even her parents thought were too bubble gum to consume back in the 70’s when they were actually popular. If she was a young woman of the noughties, instead of the nineties, she’d have more than a flirtation with manga, or she’d knit scarves out of wool harvested from her dog. As it stands, Muriel’s more than just awkward, she’s so far gone her clique “unfriends” her just before heading on a luxurious resort vacation. She “borrows” some money from her dad, under the pretext of investing in cosmetic sales (Mary Kay-type deal? I miss a lot of the dialogue between the parents. Their Australian accents are as thick as marmite), and takes a vacation of her own (about ten feet from her former friends). Here she connects with Rhonda, who somehow, in spite of having an ABBAtite almost as insatiable as Muriel’s, manages to be cool and self-possessed.

It’s this friendship that really brings Muriel to life on the edge. Rhonda creates a space for Muriel to live without fear. Muriel is not used to living without the inevitably terrible consequences of just being her weird self. As a result she does…bad things. She lies, she flees, she creates a new identity for herself. It’s bad, but it’s better than what most people do—shove whatever anti-social proclivities they have deep inside themselves. And not for nothing, because Muriel is motivated to do some weird shit. Like get married-just for the sake of having a wedding. Her romantic relationships may always be incidental with a friendship as beautiful as her and Rhonda’s. This might be the perfect antidote to the Bridget Jones romcom model—here we get to be happy for the woman-coming-into-her-own trope all by itself.

I’m amazed at how long a Honeycrisp will last in the fridge. I’m actually amazed by the fridge, every time I open it. This apple was cut three days ago and has been in the fridge since. Cut the brown bits off the edges of the apple and it’s still crisp, tart, and juicy.

4 leaves kale – cut off the yellow/mushy bits, cut 3x length-wise and again in 1″ strips cross-wise.
zucchini – cut in half and left out on the counter no less than 4 days ago – remove scarred tissue-cut in medallions
2 cloves garlic – the outlandishly large non-organic variety because my underemployment has finally gotten the better of my politics – thinly sliced, not crushed
almonds
2 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp rice wine vinegar
1 tsp sesame oil
spices: salt, turmeric, cumin, cayenne

Heat olive oil in skillet. Zucchini goes in first; allow it to soften and get golden-brown. Add kale and garlic. Kale doesn’t have as much moisture as some other greens, so leave it sit while it crisps at first, and then stir often to prevent it and the garlic sticking. Add almonds and a splash of vinegar (splash!) to accelerate cooking. Remove from heat. Toss, in a bowl, the rest of the vinegar, sesame oil, and spices to taste. Zing! Working lunch is served.

Don’t forget to oil your cast iron if you splashed vinegar in it!

Today is Joey’s birthday. It’s also the day he moves into his FIRST solo apartment, all by himself. And seriously, somehow, this scrawny kid managed to move all of his belongings into his apartment without the help of any of his friends who, God forgive them, were all busy. This meal is about convenience–it takes one pan and is delicious reheated–so we can focus on drinking champagne.

Ingredients:
macaroni shells
cream
bread crumbs (I had some stale soda bread around, but you could use panko or anything)
cheddar, goat cheese, gjetost, whatever kind of cheese you want
vegetables of your choosing
cauliflower, sweet potato, onion, garlic, kale, parsley

Preheat oven to 350

1. Cook up your veggies in a cast-iron skillet til they’re tender! Season with salt, cumin, cayenne and black pepper.

2. Boil macaroni til it’s al dente (don’t get crazy, this is gonna cook more in the oven

3. While the veggies and macaroni cook, shred cheese and stale bread.

4. Turn the heat off the stove and add pasta, cheese, 1/4 cup of cream (or enough to suspend the veggies and pasta to the same level. Stir so it’s well incorporated.

5. Add bread crumbs to the top and bung it in the oven until it’s golden brown (30 min)