WholeFoods

WholeFoods. Up until I read this AlterNet article (Natural Food, Unnatural Prices), I didn't like WholeFoods because of the people that go there and the prices. Now I hate them as a provider of goods and as a fucked up corporation too.

The People

On any given day at a WholeFoods, you will see scores of upper class white people walking around on their cell phones buying carrots, juices and meats that could easily be bought a block or so away at an respectable grocery for half the price. Most grocery stores have an organic section now where you can easily find lower price foods. You just have to look. I know a few people who insist on Whole Foods. The general line is that the food is just better and the company is responsible. As I'll discuss later, it's not. But it seems to me these people are driven more by their elitism than anything else. WholeFoods is the downside to unthinking liberalism. It's what happens as some liberal people age, they so doggedly internalize their politics, they think that somehow shopping at WholeFoods is good for the them and the world. It's this sort of fucked logic: they sell organic and charge too much, therefore they must protect the environment and pay their employees well. It's like a lazy way to save the world.

But never underestimate the elitism. I work with a WholeFooder and I mentioned the other grocery chain Key Foods to him one day. His lip curled up in disgust, "What is that?" I explained to him it's a "Grocery Store" where they sell food. He then told me he only goes to Dagostino's, if not WholeFoods, which is also unnecessarily expensive. I asked why he never went to the others. He responded, "Because it's not as fresh." Of course he'd never been. More expensive does not mean fresher. You know what does? Farmers markets. That is almost always organic and, more importantly, it was probably just picked that week. WholeFooders are just out to prove that they are rich and, basically, gigantic, gaping assholes.

The Prices

For some reason organic apples taste better and, somehow, are better for you. I suppose that's partially true but there has been little evidence that fertilizers on non-organic food will hurt you or kill you. What does a double increase in price get these people? Are they living longer? Probably, but it' unlikely it's because of the organic foods. If you are wealthy enough to shop at WholeFoods, you are also probably wealthy enough to afford a good doctor, a good gym and shopping at Crate & Barrel (which would make me happier and healthier). WholeFoods are not healthier than someone who goes to, say, Homeland (for the northerners, that's like Gristede's) and buys their weeks worth of groceries for half the price.

But there is also this misguided idea that WholeFoods is some sort of altruistic company. They must be! They sell gluten-free, dairy-free Whole Grain Soy Crisp Healthy Farms Snack Chips! They must be contributing to small farmers, environmental causes, low-cost housing, gay marriage and defeating the Bush Administration!! As the AlterNet article explains, Whole Foods is a massive company that can buy large amounts of products from the organic food producers. They can therefore get these organic foods at substantially lower prices. But are they cheaper than any other store? No. They are, in fact, significantly more expensive. Like any company, they want profit. Like any bougie-company, they know they can sell you way up (Starbucks).

The Workers

Most people bemoan Wal-Mart for not paying their employees enough and for not letting them unionize. Well Whole Food is the exact same. They have consistently squelched unions and prevent their workers from fighting for better pay. This is not to say the WholeFoods destroys local business, forces their staff on government programs and locks their workers in the stores after closing, but they aren't pampering them either. And what about their pay? The AlterNet article experimented to see if a cashier could afford to buy groceries at WholeFoods for their family. And the results were that they couldn't. Granted no one in the universe could afford to feed their families at WholeFoods (except for all the assholes I mentioned earlier) but I suppose if you can attack Wal-Mart for it, you should attack WholeFoods for it as well.

Anyway, if you couldn't tell, I hate WholeFoods.

USA Today Discovers Gay Jokes

Holy Shit, USA Today just discovered that Brokeback Mountain is generating a lot of jokes. Do you think the USA Today just now found out the gays and lesbians are always the objects of ridicule:

Film spurs culture of gay cowboy jokes

More importantly, do you think if there was a black love story, that the USA Today would have an article on black jokes. Or maybe a culture of Jew jokes after Schindler's List. Thanks USA Today, you've made making fun of gays not only acceptable but really interesting for your fourth-grade-level reading audience.

Gays Are People Too: Bad Music

Honestly, I don't know why gays and lesbians need separate music. This all started with Sony launching "Music with a Twist," a label "dedicated to nurturing lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans-gendered artists." [Reuters]

Okay, so I get it. You're gay. You want to sing. But what is Music With A Twist going to offer that I couldn't get on, say, Dreamworks who has Rufus Wainwright. Or simply stick with regular Sony, who has the Indigo Girls. Scissor Sister is already on Universal, and there's lots of horrible house music on whatever label keeps pumping that shit out. And trannies are abound. Antony and the Johnsons is on Secretly Canadian and Le Tigre's drummer on Universal. So what is the point of making a gay-centric label? To foster the 'mos in their efforts to be creative (because homosexuals have never been known as creative before):

The label also plans to release various compilations geared towards gay and bisexual audiences, as well as music fans everywhere, featuring hit songs by established artists that have been embraced by gay, bisexual and trans-gendered audiences as well as tracks from emerging gay artists.

Oh my god! Thank Jesus! Finally, I can get all of the awful awful house music I've wanted. You know, the over produced synth pop with some soulful singer crooning and screaming "You got to" or "I've had it" or "Baby" over and over. And does this mean NSync, Britney Spears and all the other top 40 trash that EVERY SINGLE HOMOSEXUAL loves?

Fuck Music With A Twist. Is it possible that gays are not a homogeneous group and that efforts to put them in one is a bad idea? And what about a band with one homosexual, do they go to Music With a Twist? Does Iron Maiden Judas Priest [thanks Joey] get re-released because their leader singer was a fag? All I know is that when something is geared towards the "Gay Me," I tend to not like it. Like Logo -- with their specials on tanning or the best place to travel for gay clubs that are, other than the color of the people in it, still gay bars blasting house and pop -- do I really want music simply because it is just gay. I like music because I like the melody, the rhythm, the lyrics, the whatever. I do not like it because it's got some who gets fucked in the ass or fisted. I just don't care and think efforts to pigeonhole someone as a "gay" artist is a bad idea. Let the art speak for itself.

And despite the fact that this is a bad idea, there's AOL's new section:
G Sides, Music for the LGBT Community

Honestly, if I was young and starting to realize I was gay, I would not come out if I thought my sexual orientation meant listening to fucking house music, Cyndi Lauper and Boy George.



Special Note: Okay, so the image at the very top is from Sid Spencer, a real honest-to-God homosexual country singer. I happened to find him while searching for images to use, and I really feel like that album cover is the best album cover of all time. I salute him.

Sleep Aid

I hate flying. A lot. I have what seems to be mild panic attacks whenever any amount of turbulence hits. This keeps me from sleeping. And since I'm flying down to South America soon on a 12 hour overnight plane flight, I wonder to myself: How will I sleep? Not only do I have panic attacks on planes, but I have (more or less) a moderate addiction to sleeping pills. And since I'm not sure the definition of sleeping pill addiction, I will simply state that I take, every day, some sort of sleep aid unless I'm drunk or stoned, at which point I generally take one anyway but think a little longer about it. This leaves me wondering, should I go to the doctor and tell them I'm a crack head who can't sleep? Or should I go and simply say "Please give me two ambien for my plane flight." I'm slowly weaning myself off sleeping pills at the moment and I don't necessarily want to be put on prescription sleep since I doubt I could ever stop using those. I've never taken a medication before. Are they good?

Anyway, here is my sleeping pill review:


Doxylamine succinate
(NyQuil and generics)

This is the first thing I ever took to get to sleep. It's sort of woozy sleep at first and then you're out. Unfortunately, this has almost no effect on me now. And they took out the pseudoephedrine because it's used as narcotic and not just a way to make falling asleep sick more fun.




Diphenhydramine
(Tylenol PM, Tylenol Simply Sleep, Sominex, Nytol and Generics)

Tylenol PM is the classic with 25 mg of Diphenhydramine. These little dolls helped me through most of High School and the beginning of College. It's really hard to fall asleep in a new place, especially a "low cost triple" in NYU housing without air conditioning so these were necessary. Unfortunately these don't work the way they use to anymore either.
On the upside, Tylenol started making Simple Sleep, which is Tylenol PM without the painkilling agent Acetaminophen but still only 25 mg of Diphenhydramine. Curiously, it's significantly more expensive to buy Diphenhydramine without Acetaminophen than with it. So if you don't particularly value your liver, go for some generic Tylenol PM and save some cash for the transplant.




Dimenhydrinate
(Dramamine and generics)

Ever wonder why this made you so sleepy? It's because Dramamine is made of Dimenhydrinate, which is very closely chemically related to our friend Diphenhydramine. This only has 29 mg of Dimenhydrinate, so you gotta take three of these to fall asleep like you would with Tylenol PM. These used to knock me out. However, it seems abusing this drug builds your tolerance up pretty quickly.




Melatonin

This is the only herbal/natural pill that I actually believe works (unlike St. John's Wort and Echinaeca, which is a bunch of placebo crap). This stuff takes a lot longer to set in, about an hour, and the sleepiness of it feels a little more like your body is actually falling asleep (the exact opposite of the sudden fog of diphenhydramines). I like this stuff for the most part. It doesn't leave me particularly groggy in the morning (not that I am ever not groggy in the morning) and I can make believe it is better for me than something chemical.


I'm slowly trying to work my way off the pills. This has involved a biography of Joseph McCarthy (which is interesting but much much stronger than NyQuil) for half an hour every night. It also helps now that I have ear plugs so I can drowned out my two roommates who insist on making meals all night and bringing very nice but loud people over. I still take the Melatonin, though... But luckily I stopped living my life like this:

Dying to Get Married

AlterNet: Fear, Loathing, and the AIDS Generation: By Kai Wright, The Nation.

This was an interesting article in AlterNet about gay men and our now ever increasing tendencies to catch, spread and ignore AIDS, syphilis and other diseases. The first point comes from Larry Kramer, the AIDS activist who wrote in his book "The Tragedy of Today's Gays" about how we are killing ourselves with unprotected sex. I would tend to agree, but I'm a bit less shrill about it and less quick to blame every single gay man. The real culprit, as it was in the past, is society.

Now I'm not completely blaming society on this one. I do have a lot of sympathy for anyone who catches an STD, but at the same time, every man in New York City knows that doing crystal meth and having group sex is probably going to give you AIDS. It's not a "Well maybe open anal fissures and six different guys' cum in my ass" will give me AIDS situation, it's a "You just got AIDS" situation. People know better.

And then there's the whole issue of barebacking. Which sounds more kinky than it is. Fucking without a condom and having cum in you ass I'm sure is just really really hot, but at the same time, is it really? I'm okay with the condom. It seems to me like it's not only safe but, just as unnervingly important to me, hygienic. Anal sex is not without it's flecks of leftovers and smells, so let's not get too hot and bothered about getting that actually stuck on your penis.

I'm sort of meandering though. The Wright article mentions two key points: gay sex is assumed to be unnecessary and the intimacy of barebacking is undervalued. Direct quote:

Odets argues that by refusing to acknowledge the utterly natural reasons why a gay man may long to eschew protection during an act in which vulnerability is so central, we establish an unattainable standard--protected sex forever, until, um, marriage?--and create stigma for those who can't live up to it. "That does just what it did to homosexuality--which is push people into the closet," he concludes. "The feelings about unprotected sex get acted out impulsively and more dangerously than they would have."

Too many HIV prevention programs, he argues, are rooted in the assumption that sex between men is just empty calories. Sure, we can have it, but it's not worth taking any chances. "Gay men are sort of loath to assert the importance of sex," Odets says. "Unprotected sex is important in a lot of ways," he insists. "Why isn't it obvious to people that someone coming inside you can be experienced as intimacy? It's obvious for heterosexual couples. But if gay sex is just this perverse recreation, then it's not worth any risk." [AlterNet]

The article goes on to discuss how cumming inside someone is very intimate and that the presumption that only tweaked out Chelsea queens are the ones having unprotected anal sex is wrong. I'd agree. I've met a few semi-regular 'mos who have barebacked with a close boyfriend. Both had been tested and both were monogamous and knew it was safe. But I couldn't disagree more. To me, you can only really establish this sort of sexual act in the relative safety of marriage or serious commitment. And I think every man needs to honestly sit back and consider a few things before they decide it's seriously committed. First of all, how many people has your partner had sex with? AIDS can take almost six months to show up on test. How long have you seriously dated? Sure you may have dated for the last 8 months, but was it just serious and monogamous in the last two? Are you completely sure he didn't have sex with anyone else why you were dating in the beginning? And keep in mind, would you tell them if you had? I would probably lie just to not upset anything that was just working out so well right now.

But the real problem is that gays are denied the protection of marriage. This isn't just the laws and rights, but the socially recognized and re-enforced notions that come with marriage. Most people are loathe to have sex with someone who is married and would be disappointed in a friend who cheated on their husband. But in the gay world, a world were commitments are largely a perpetual state of "boyfriend-hood," how strongly recognized are these on the outside. If gays and lesbians are denied the socially reinforced and culturally recognized unions, fidelity is harder to keep up. Guaranteeing that your partner is HIV-negative is harder to do. But more over, gay men are not encouraged in any significant way to seek out or enter monogamous, loving relationships.

In my thesis on long term gay couples, the one question that left these couples at a loss was "Were there any relationship role models for you?" In the media, in entertainment, there are a few if any gay and lesbian couple role models. There are no sitcoms about a gay couple dealing with life and love. There are few dramatic movies about same-sex couples falling in love (and Brokeback Mountain being the most obvious one now isn't exactly the best example of a couple dealing with their relationship in a constructive way). There are also very few gay couples in real life and even less who are open that we can emulate or at least see as viable option in our futures. A few people I interviewed for my thesis sometimes said their role models were their parents, albeit a little begrudgingly, and most said they were making it up as they went along. Unfortunately, not everyone is that resourceful. People fundamentally need role models. As children we imitate what we see in our world to make sense of it and to learn how to act in it. But without same-sex couple role models, without people to give us same-sex couple advice, we are left with nothing.

The people who cause gay and lesbians the greatest harm are conservatives, misguided Christians and a majority of US citizens. I don't in anyway discredit individual agency in this, that people make their own decisions that can lead to AIDS, but in a lot of ways our hands are tied. If we really want to fight AIDS and STD's, we need a society that encourages monogamous relationships, opposite-sex and same-sex. I know I'll get it from people who don't want to reinforce heterosexist norms, but I completely reject that argument. There is little that is heterosexist about two guys fucking each other the rest of their lives, safely and lovingly.

Your Child Is Not Special, He's Fucking Annoying

This is ridiculous. In general, I hate conservatives and closed minded people. I think that you should be open to new idea and embrace a lot of what people choose to believe and practice as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else. Sort of, whatever you want to do, go for it. However, there seems to be this ultra-liberal, retarded parent movement on Indigo Children (not related to Gingers). Indigo children, you ask? What does that mean? Ask the NYTimes:

Indigo children were first described in the 1970's by a San Diego parapsychologist, Nancy Ann Tappe, who noticed the emergence of children with an indigo aura, a vibrational color she had never seen before. This color, she reasoned, coincided with a new consciousness.

In "The Indigo Children," Mr. Carroll and Ms. Tober define the phenomenon. Indigos, they write, share traits like high I.Q., acute intuition, self-confidence, resistance to authority and disruptive tendencies, which are often diagnosed as attention-deficit disorder, known as A.D.D., or attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, or A.D.H.D. [NYTimes]

Now, I understand a lot of people hate modern psychology. They think meds are over-prescribed, that people aren't learning to just deal. Further, people are convinced that their annoying little children are actually not annoying but special. Well, your child is special. He's special in that there is a neurochemical imbalance in your child's head that makes him annoying to every single human being but you. I understand that you want to believe your kid is not fucked up. But you have to understand that when your kid cannot read anything, can't focus on a math problem or do anything for more than a minute, the kid is clearly fucked up.


More importantly, your kid does not have a stupid purple aura. Your child is not on another spectral plain. Your child is loud, obnoxious, frustrating and should be heavily medicated into some sort of stupor.

And this is what I admire about conservative people. While the believe in such fictional things as Jesus, God and the War on Terror, they do not believe in auras, special "vibrational energy" or telepathy. Obviously both extremes of this are really really ridiculous. If you think I'm being mean or over-reacting, people who believe in this have the potential to really hurt people. Annette Piper "had planned to go to medical school until she realized she was an indigo, able to tell what was wrong with people by touching them."

I can tell without touching Annette that she's an idiot.

MacBook

Time to get geeky.

Apple just released the MacBook Pro which contains the new Intel Dual Core processors. That means it's really fast. But most importantly, it means that everyone who has a PowerBook has an obsolete computer. So ha-ha-ha-ha. Now you might say someone with a iBook G3 is one to talk, but you know what, my shit was obsolete when I bought it four and half years ago. And it was way cheaper.

More importantly, Apple dropped the PowerBook name. This seems ridiculous. "PowerBook" was pretty well known among most computer users as being really fast and really nice. MacBook sounds like a child's version of the PowerBook. Steve Jobs said he wanted to drop "Power" since the dropped the PowerPC but Power also has a certain ring to it that implies, well, a powerful computer. So what is the iBook going to become? Just the plain old MacBook? Or will it be the MacBook Ghetto? And the PowerMac line? The MacMac?

Kudos, however, on the return to the black colored computers. Blackish, dark gray computers not only look really cool but they also don't get fucked up as easily. Take for instance any one you know with a white iBook. Most people, unlike me, don't clean them periodically. This leaves brown and black smudges from hand oil. It's gross.



Anyway, Apple released new iMacs and MacBooks with Intel chips (starting at $2000) but no new consumer laptops. This leaves me in the state I was in before, which is deparately wanting a new Mac, but wanting to hold out for a low cost Mactel laptop. Well, thanks Apple for updating your higher profit margin lines.

Apple also released a bunch of other programs that I, and most everyone else, will probably never use, let alone pay for:
.Mac
iLife '06
iWorks '06

New Years Resolution: Die of Cancer Faster

The obvious answer for a New Years Resolution should have been "Quit Smoking." This is, of course, not going to happen anytime soon. First of all, I don't want to quit. Those horrible ads where they cut open that person's brain who died of an aneurysm because they smoked, doesn't really phase me. I smoke now, on average, five cigarettes a day. I've cut way back since April and I'm happy where I am. Surprisingly, I've kept it up too. Sometimes I smoke more (like when I'm heavily drinking [which is technically only on Friday and Saturday nights]) but it averages to five a day.

So my resolution is not to quit. I need a real incentive for that, like a boyfriend or asthma. Until then, I'm still going to look cool.

However, I did decide to do something else for 2006: Cut back on sugar. Two of my roommates have already done this and I'm sort of tagging along. My primary target for the sugar saving: Coffee. For the last six years my morning cup of joe has been this:

1 average cup coffee + enough half and half to tinge the color light brown + two table spoons of sugar = my morning coffee

Recently this had changed into one Starbucks coffee and 6 packets of sugar. So since I've gained about 15 pounds at work and my teeth are rotting out of my skull, I decided to cut the sugar out of my coffee. I've been experimenting heavily with artificial sweeteners. There are three primary sweeteners that I know of: Sweet N' Low, Equal and Splenda. The only one I haven't tried is Equal and that's because no one I've ever met uses it.

With this idea in my mind, I asked people what they used as substitutes. it became quickly obvious that people are also very dedicated to their artificial sweeteners. My parents are die-hard Sweet N' Low users, my mom even carrying those pink packets in her person, just in case of emergency. My friend Ely told me he was used to the taste of Splenda, that real sugar didn't even taste good to him anymore. My roommate told me he liked the taste now too. It seemed to me that Splenda was addictive. When I mentioned Sweet N' Low, their eyes would bug out like any addict and they yelp, "That stuff will give you cancer."

And I ignored that these two smoked.

But there have been numerous reports that the saccharine in Sweet N' Low is lethal. Cancerous, even. The wikipedia explains the problems with Sweet'N Low as such:

In Canada, where saccharin is currently banned except for diabetic use only, the artificial sweetener used in Sweet'N Low is cyclamate. Ironically, cyclamate is banned in the United States. Both bans extend from the same set of experimental results from the 1960s in which a blend of saccharin and cyclamate was linked to bladder cancer in animal test subjects. The results were inconclusive and the US and Canada ended up each banning one of the two products. [ Wikipedia]

I started with Splenda.

Splenda is repellent. It tastes the way I imagine crystallized cancer would. One packet in my coffee makes it undrinkable and wretched. It's like I accidentally knocked thinly sweet bile into my coffee. Fuck Splenda.

Sweet N' Low is different. I don't mind it. In fact, the taste of one packet of Sweet N' Low in my large cup of coffee is enough to give the vague illusions of sweetness. It's okay and does the job.

But am I really going to die of bladder cancer because of it? I looked a little more. Everyone has heard that saccharin causes cancer in mice. Well does it? Yes. But it appeared that bladder cancer occurred in only male mice and this was later shown to be because of the sodium in the injections:

Cohen said his research showed that when the sodium form of saccharin combines with rat urine, it creates crystal-like stones in the bladder of the animal. Those stones, in turn, lead to cellular changes that cause cancer.

But human urine is vastly different from rat urine, Cohen said, and does not react with saccharin the same way. "We now have enough understanding to know that this is a rat-specific phenomenon," he said in an interview earlier this week. [NYTimes]

In the end, it looks like Sweet'N Low is safe and so is all that saccharin. Another important point is that saccharin has been around for 20 years and there has been no increase in bladder cancer. And as Dr. Whelan says:

The real preventable causes of cancer include cigarette smoking, alcohol abuse (particularly in conjunction with smoking), overexposure to sunlight, promiscuous unprotected sex (a risk factor for cervical cancer), high-dose exposure to radiation, occupational (high-level of exposure to) chemicals, and some pharmaceuticals. Knowledge of these causes is derived from studies of people, not rodents. [ACSH]

So kids put a check mark by all of the things you do that really give you cancer:

Cigarette Smoking
Alcohol Abuse
Smoking and Drinking at the same time
Promiscuous Sex
High Dose Radiation (Cell Phone)
Occupational Chemicals (LCD Monitors)
Pharmaceuticals (Every sleep aid known to man)

When Borrowing My Money, Ask Please

As a cheap bastard, which can be confirmed by all my ex's and friends, I knew something was up the second my Washington Mutual account seemed to dip slightly.  I sensed that, despite copious Christmas shopping and an uncontrolled binging fest of magazines, starbucks and shit food at the airport while waiting for six hours after I missed my flight (fuck the TWU), something was afoot.  And since I check my checking account balance about twice a day, it was inevitable I would find out that someone had stolen my debit card information.

The first clue was a charge to iFriends.com, a porno site.  It's conceivable that this was mine.  In a depressed, drunk bender, it is completely reasonable that I would have paid for a membership to Sean Cody or some other "straight" guys fucking each other site.  But then I checked iFirends.  Straight porno, like jizz on titties kind of thing.  Which, is just gross.

And then charges to McAfee.com started to pop up which is, ironically, an Internet security software company.  So i called iFriends and the told me that whoever made the account with them had my phone number, address, card number and security pin.  Awesome.  However, the fucker who created the account used the email address quinnell.ben@gmail.com

So everyone, please let quinnell.ben@gmail.com know that he is a total prick.  This is probably a dummy account, but go ahead, send him a couple of emails telling him to fuck off and die.

In the end, I had to cancel my card, which has basically cut me off from having cash for the last week.  The charges will be reimbursed to my account sometime next week.  But I'm still pissed that Ben Quinnel would take my money.  I mean, I'm broke as shit.  At least take money from someone who has it.  Or even better, someone who has parents who gives them money.  Or who have a trust fund.  You know, Manhattanites.