cilantro

The door-to-door organic delivery box this week contained two bunches of cilantro.   I adore the stuff: Alice can't stand it.   Because of some genetic excess or deficiency on her part, apparently it tastes, most unpleasantly, of soap.   This is an even more unarguable aversion than, say, my own highly developed dislike of marzipan.   So when she's away, I gorge myself on it (and, indeed, on various other unfavored foods, like cumin seeds, which, fortunately, go very well with some things that one concocts with cilantro - like salads of black beans and canned tuna (lunch), or a cucumber and cilantro raita to go with a Turkish dish of onions and carrots and leeks and a little bit of rice and lemon juice (dinner).

For really, what can I say, other than celebrate the ordinary, in a day when the media is crammed with analysis of the Tyler Clementi tragedy: when one's suspended somewhere between the unbearable poignancy of his final Facebook status posting - a minute or so before he jumped - and feeling real anger at the mindlessness of the people who've set up Facebook support groups for the students who've been rightly charged for their thoughtless actions.   I never thought that I'd be cheering Chris Christie, but just for once NJ's Governor has managed to say the right thing, and to say it directly and bluntly and with feeling.   I'm really heartened to hear that the football team plans a moment - "a moment"? - of silence at Saturday's game; and I plan to be at tomorrow's commemorative gathering at Brower at lunchtime.   If anything good comes out of this by way of heightening awareness around campus, that's excellent.   But one would so very much rather not be thinking of an event like this as a teachable moment, because it's appalling that it happened in the first place.