Chickpeas? I think I have eaten them cold with baby spinach when visiting an eatery with a salad bar. The salad bar was free with the warm meal, so I would eat one plate after another from the salad bar until i was stuffed, and then bring home the warm meal to eat at home when the creaturely appetite once again reared its ugly head, or belly, I should say.
I will look into chickpeas. Do you purchase them hard and let them soak in water, or do you eat them from a can? I like to soak the hard black-eye peas over night, but, in a pinch, with garlic and onions added, the canned black-eye peas are sufficient. I hadn't eaten black-eye peas until I was incarcerated at age 19. Learning about those was one of the benefits of having been incarcerated, along with never being eligible for jury duty when summoned by the Court. Who knows, maybe I ought to be thankful for having these little stains on the resume of my existence, since this may have prevented potential employers (like Bloomberg in Manhattan) from hiring me when I was hunting for the cheese (like a Volkswagen, perhaps?).
I know I enjoy black-eye peas, but I have to limit beans due to the Mother's diet. My sister, as I think I have mentioned, as well as her estranged son, my nephew, is a vegetarian and consumes lots of types of beans. The next time I see her, I will inquire about a chickpea recipe. She turned me on to spinach soup made with lots of garlic. I add carrots to the recipe.
When I tell my nephew that I sometimes eat fresh zucchini and squash for breakfast, he thinks that's the greatest news.
As you know, my sister is extremely Catholic, and yet, when I have her and my Dad over to share a meal (I generally cook fresh salmon with a Japanese sauce I have mastered), we get along well. I usually give her a large can of dry pitted prunes and Maple syrup as a gesture of brotherly love, and I just take a deep breath when she says grace invoking her Father in Heaven. As you have reminded me on several occasions, it is better she is a devout Catholic than an ambitious co-caine chasing movie star, I suppose. I could easily picture her entering some kind of religious order in her old age should her husband pass many years before she is "called" back into the Void.
So, I read a few paragraphs of the scientific study you pointed to, and I can vouch that, back in 2007 when living in an apartment complex in a town called Matawan, I had grown very attached to a female neighbor and really did imagine the romantic goo-ga-ga feelings were mutual. I also remeber clearly crying tears of anguish which actually caused my throat to hurt as I attempted to supress the sounds so as not to alert my neighbors to my heartache.
So, the following paragraph struck me as right on the money from my personal experience:
The results suggest large gender differences in how men and women experience opposite-sex friendships. Men were much more attracted to their female friends than vice versa. Men were also more likely than women to think that their opposite-sex friends were attracted to them — a clearly misguided belief. In fact, men’s estimates of how attractive they were to their female friends had virtually nothing to do with how these women actually felt, and almost everything to do with how the men themselves felt — basically, males assumed that any romantic attraction they experienced was mutual, and were blind to the actual level of romantic interest felt by their female friends. Women, too, were blind to the mindset of their opposite-sex friends; because females generally were not attracted to their male friends, they assumed that this lack of attraction was mutual. As a result, men consistently overestimated the level of attraction felt by their female friends and women consistently underestimated the level of attraction felt by their male friends.
I no longer overestimate my "sexual prowess" and feel I have become more "whole" since I have come to accept that I am a Natural Born Schopenhauer Disciple. He may have been what we might call a "selfish" man, but, considering the cold relationship he had with his worldly social butterfly mother, the suicide of his father, the moneys he inherited which he chose to stretch over a lifetime living minimalistically, I feel like I really understood his motives for being so selfish when it came to how he was spend his time "thinking about the problem of existence".
When it comes to what I want to devote my attention to, I am also a selfish man who has learned from experience that so much of what Schopenhauer says about interacting with others is true for me personally as well.
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One more comment: Towards the end of the article it states,
So, can men and women be “just friends?” If we all thought like women, almost certainly. But if we all thought like men, we’d probably be facing a serious overpopulation crisis.Is it just me? What planet is this author living on? I was under the impression that we ARE facing a serious overpopulation crisis. Going over logarithmic and exponential functions, I can't help but notice that for a few hundred thousand years the human population was growing maybe at a linear rate, and by around 1800 when Schopenhauer was a youngster, it had reached
1 billion.
By around 1930 it doubled to 2 billion, with a doubling time of about 120 years.
By 1974 or so, the human population doubled again to 4 billion, this time with a doubling time of less than 40 years.
Supposedly it will reach 8 billion within the next 10 years, so doubling within 50 years from when it was 4 billion. Hell, during my own lifetime, it's gone from over 3 billion to over 7 billion. Can this be right? I suppose so.
The authorities are always concerned about too many deer coming out of the woods (what woods?!?) and causing damage to the gort-mobiles. Bears have been seen basking in the sun inside some of the more well-to-do gorts McMansion pools. Everyone knows that the problem isn't too much wildlife, but too many gorts!
I notice that in areas of the world where there is famine and disease that the peoples are still engaged in this "going forth and multiplying". Maybe all we can do is watch it play itself out. In the meantime, we all need to eat food, and the majority, it seems, not only enjoys sexual relations, but actually makes a conscious decision to impose life on future generations in cold blood.
Anyway, I just wanted to point out that there is a chance that overpopulation will end up being ever-so ironically the Number One threat to the survival of our species. It turns out that less really is more.
Even if the breeders on this global plantation have snide remarks about their fellow humans who are not up to the task of providing for a family, they can at the very least appreciate that not all of us will be contributing to the overpopulation crisis.
Also, rather than making those who choose not to invest in a motor vehicle feel like some kind of "loser," maybe society might organize transportation to make it possible for less and less people to NEED an automobile to collect their groceries.
I can't solve any of these problems. With George Carlin, I say, "If you think there's a solution, you're part of the problem!"
As always, it is great hearing from the Kafka of Northern India.
Peace.