I’ve been thinking about privilege lately.  The impetus was my own privilege.  I (and several others) had inadvertently supported a racist statement because I didn’t recognize the racism in it.  

This primary and this election are not about "the heart and soul of the Democratic Party".  It is about the heart and soul of America, and the future of the progressive movement.

Life has a way of reminding us of what's important.

Per Caneel's excellent suggestion, I decided to write a completely frivolous, community-oriented, not-really-directly-political diary about our favorite subject: food.

This isn't going to be a really deep diary, unfortunately, since I'm writing it at the very moment it's supposed to go up (and with my dinner almost done cooking).  But I wanted to make sure we got a Class and Labor diary up tonight and I was talking about this a little bit earlier today, so I thought it would be a good subject.

When they're alive, it's gossip; when they're gone, it's reminiscing.

(This'll have to be a short one tonight, since I wasn't going to post anything until an hour ago.)

It's incredibly late, but I don't see a Class and Labor diary, so I figured I would put up an open thread.

There are a few things that I want in this world: some sort of attachment to my bike that would allow me to carry things, a cooking thermometer, more shelving.  Most of what I want is material and not particularly important; I can carry most things in my backpack, assess approximate water temperature on the back of my hand, and continue to pile papers and books and work materials on top of each other.  But one thing that I really want, that isn't material and that is important, is the luxury of outrage.

It was 364 days ago that Feminisms began.  I had the honor of writing the first Feminisms diary, and now I have the honor of writing the diary for the one-year anniversary of this series.

In the past 6 years, we have been watching the middle class continue in their excessive, destructive lifestyle.  Addicted to oil, both for gas and for plastic, their careless accumulation and shedding has continued to damage the environment with little regard for, or awareness of, their contribution to climate change.  We lament the fact that the middle class continues to fiddle while the Earth burns.

But we have to keep hoping and believing that someday, we can change this.  We have to believe that someday, we can steer the middle class in a more progressive direction.  This is a part two in a series on how I believe we can guide the middle class in a better direction.

In the past 6 years, we have been watching the middle class get squeezed.  Tax cuts for the rich, stagnant wages, removal or contraction of vital parts of the safety net, increasing retail prices and insurance premiums, etc...  We lament the growing distance between the rich and the poor and how those in between are looking more and more haggard.  

But we have to keep hoping and believing that someday, we can change this.  We have to believe that someday, when the last of the neocon Republicans is quieted, swept out of office or - better yet - locked up, we can restore the strength and vitality of the middle class.  This is a two part series on how I believe that can be accomplished.

This may come as a surprise to many of you who know me here, but I've always had a hard time making friends with other women.  I'm often more comfortable around men; I get tongue-tied around women, unsure of what to say to them, as if other women are somehow alien.  Which is absurd, considering how many of the good friends I have here who are female (um, all of them!) and how well I get along with them, but that fact is helping me work on it.  It's also given me some food for thought for this diary.

Let me just admit right away that I am a flirt.  But I didn't start off like this; I wasn't born with the skill to flirt.  A late bloomer (and an anthropologist by nature), I studied flirting avidly.  Close friends who already had the knack were always a good source, and from there I experimented as much as I could.  (Frankly, I'm surprised that I haven't written a treatise on the Universal Theory of Flirtatious Behavior yet.  Hmm, now there's an idea for my senior project...!)  So you can skip the studying if you continue reading below.  

But there's a big catch-22 about flirting: if you don't do it a lot, you probably won't be good at it, but if you're not good at it, you probably won't do it a lot.  From friends of mine who were mystified by the intricacies of flirting, I've come to realize that it isn't as obvious as we often make it out to be.  So here is the information that can get you started on being a great flirt, de-classified and as straight forward as possible, but you'll have to work out the kinks for yourself.

When was the last time you thought about hunger?

It doesn't seem to get much play on this website.  Which is weird, considering how much the subject of food comes up; we talk all the time about what we're eating in diaries like What's For Dinner or OrangeClouds115's always excellent diaries, and recipes are posted on a regular basis both in Top Comments and as a way of responding to trolls without feeding them.  Yet rarely does the subject of how much food we eat come up.  

We're mostly pretty affluent here, so starvation is probably not something very many of us face, and it shows.  A recent search revealed only 32 diaries that had to do with hunger, none of which had hunger in America as the central subject.  35.1 million people - about 10% of our population - are going hungry in our country, and we're not talking about it.  I'm just as guilty as everyone else... maybe even more so, since I know what it's like....

Since our lucky friends are off having a fantastic time in Chicago, and since kath25 asked me to fill in tonight, I think we should have a little fun here ourselves.  We talk an awful lot about serious stuff here at Under-35, so while the parents are away, let's have a little par-tay.

Okay, maybe it's not a party like the Yearly Kos parties, what with us all sitting alone on our computers in our pajamas drinking our beverages of choice, but we can still share some entertainment thanks to technology, cyber pajama party-style.

Our bodies are a fascinating thing, something we're stuck with and judged by, something that we are supposed to flaunt but know little about, something simultaneously stigmatized, idealized, and real to those of us who live in them.  Yet often, we are unable to talk publicly about our physical experiences, faced with anything from disdain to violence simply for voicing what society wants to suppress, for pulling the curtain back and revealing the sacred/profane/mundane mysteries.

I know you're out there, fellow Oklahoma residents and Kossacks!  Why don't we see how many of us there really are?