Craziness keeps me sane...

I got the idea for this project from actual conversations that I had with friends and with my small group, below is the rough draft of my paper:

Anna Williams

English 102

Four Discourses

Rough Draft

Phobias, Quirks, or Craziness

Like many of Loan’s assignments I usually don’t know what, how, or where to begin but fortunately for me this time we started talking about the project before we actually started which really helped me because it gave me the jumping off point. The word I chose this time around was “phobia” I chose this word because of a conversation I had with a friend about their weird phobia (more on that later). When most people think of phobias myself included they usually think of “arachnophobia – the fear of spiders” or “germaphobia – the fear of germs” but there are also a bunch of other crazy phobias that I would’ve never thought of had I not done the research on them take for example “cacophobia – the fear of ugliness” everybody has their own opinion on what they consider to be ugly so how do professionals make that call? There’s also “geniophobia – the fear of chins” what in the world is a chin going to do to come off of the body and attack you, I don’t think so, one of the ones that really made me laugh was “alliumphobia – the fear of garlic” um are you a vampire and are you scared that the garlic will vaporize you or whatever garlic is supposed to do to vampires. In researching this project I had a Loan moment where one thing got me thinking about another thing and I found ways to link them so if my paper seems a little erratic, THAT’S WHAT IT’S SUPPOSED TO BE LIKE.

I for one never thought of myself as having any “actual” phobias and the only thing that did cross my mind I didn’t necessarily consider it a phobia but more like a quirk but in talking to my family (nothing like family honesty to keep you humble) they informed me that I had not one but TWO phobias. I’ll cave on one (only because I found it in the phobia list) but the other one I refuse to budge on but I’ll let you be the judge. My first phobia but not really a phobia is – feet – I’m freaked out by feet touching me, come on people they’re dirty. I don’t mind baby’s feet but once you get past a certain age feet are just ugly looking. It took me years before I could actually sleep barefooted because I didn’t even like feeling my own feet touching my legs but overtime I’ve gotten better about it, I sleep barefooted now and can even stand to see people in sandals, most of the time, let’s face some people have ugly feet. Although my fears of feet aren’t necessarily groundless I’m very aware of the fact that I have no reason why I’m freaked out by them other than the fact that they’re ugly. My second or in my opinion my only phobia isn’t groundless and comes from a very real place and something that haunts me to this day and that’s called “teratophobia – the fear of deformed people” I know that doesn’t sound very nice but let me explain where this fear comes from, when I was a little kid my dad used to work with severely disabled people, both mentally and physically, and whenever my mom would take me with her to have lunch with him or pick him up from work they would chase me around in their wheelchairs trying to play with me and touch my hair (it was past my butt) for a young child that was a very traumatizing experience and it still haunts me to this day. I mean no offense by this but I really wanted to keep this paper as real as possible and hope that that’s what I achieved. In thinking about my own quirks/phobias I started wondering about my own friend’s weird crazy fears and came up with some interesting ones, hopefully you enjoy them as much as I do.

(The following stories are real but the names have been changed to protect the innocent.)

One of my really good friends Annabelle had a thing about birds but I figured that it was just like everybody else’s in and of the fact that “normal people” don’t like birds flying towards their heads for fear that they’ll crap on them or something like that but her fear ran much deeper than that and I never thought much about it until one day at lunch. So here we are sitting outside enjoying our lunch and I noticed some birds milling about looking for food, like I said I never thought much about her bird thing, I decided that I was going to throw little pieces of my tortilla on the floor to feed the birds as soon as the birds got within 50 feet of her she jumped up from the table spilling her drink all over the place and ran away freaking out while everyone else around her looked at her like she was crazy. I felt sorry for her but I’ll admit another side of me found it entertaining, with her voice shaking and her face terrified with fear she kept asking me to please please shoo them away. I took compassion on her and did as she asked since she refused to sit down until they were far away from us. When she finally sat down I asked her where this fear came from and found out that when she was little her grandma had birds and one day she decided she wanted to let them out of their cage so that she can play with them but once she opened the cage they flew out and she thought they were going to kill her, ever since then she’s been terrified of birds, as it turns out the fear of birds is called “ornithophobia” since one of my own fears/phobias stems from childhood I completely understand where she’s coming from .

Now my friend Marie’s fear isn’t stemmed from childhood and didn’t appear till much later in life but never the less it’s something that terrifies her to the point where she can’t sleep and since it affects her life so much more than mine or Annabelle’s fears and although I can’t find it in the mix of all the phobias it’s a phobia just the same and I decided to call it “alienophobia – the fear of aliens”. I know that sounds crazy and when she first told me I thought she was joking but it turns out she was dead serious. Let me explain a few things about Marie she’s not some crazy whack job walking the streets, well I guess she could be depending on who you ask, but for the most part she’s a normal girl just like everyone else who works and goes to school and if you were to meet her you wouldn’t have any idea that she’s freaked out by aliens. Okay back to the story and how she explained the whole thing to me, one night on our way home someone made a joke about her being abducted by aliens, pretty sure I made the joke but whatever, so the joke was made and she said that’s not funny didn’t I ever tell you about my fear of aliens? I, of course, laughed like most people would thinking that she was just messing with me but she said I’m serious so I had to ask “what are you talking about” turns out her fears actually came from a movie, when she was living in the dorms she watched the movie Signs by herself and didn’t think anything of it but sometime later she moved home decided to watch the movie again since it had been awhile since she had seen it not really thinking much of it because nothing had happened to her the first time she watched it but this time would be different. She’s home alone watching the movie in the dark and she got so freaked out by it that she couldn’t sleep (the difference between this time and the first time is that in the dorms your never truly alone and it’s rare that you’ll be surrounded in complete darkness where it’s so quiet you can hear a pin drop) her insomnia continued for two weeks because she was to afraid to go to sleep and if she did try to sleep she would sleep with the lights on. When her mom asked her why she was sleeping with the lights on she told her that she fell asleep reading. Once her mom found out what the real reason was she was so amused by it that one day she went out and bought her nightlight but not just any nightlight it was an alien nightlight and once Marie came home and seen she screamed as her parents laughed at her from down the hall. She freaks out when she relays this story so a couple of us suggested that she get hypnotized to find out why she’s so freaked out by aliens but she won’t do it because she’s afraid that she’s going to find out that she was really abducted by aliens and that they performed some experiment on her, not likely but it scares her just the same.

For all my friends out there who love to sit back and relax with a good beer or Happy Hour is your favorite time of the day (aka Tamara, lol) this one’s for you.

Ambitious Brew: A not so bitter history

More than 10 years ago Mark Dorber, the venerable publican from London, told perhaps 30 beer enthusiasts who had gathered for a seminar prior to the first Real Ale Festival in Chicago, “The god of beer … is not consistency.”

Dorber might appreciate the new book Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer but he surely wouldn’t enjoy the underlying story told by Maureen Ogle. A historian by training — her previous books include All the Modern Conveniences: American Household Plumbing, 1840-1890 — Ogle explains in detail that is painful for thousands of American beer drinkers who think like Dorber just how America drifted into a beer monoculture in which homogenization in pursuit of consistency ruled and niche markets merited little attention.

The book would be more accurately subtitled “he Story of Industrial American Lager” because it pretty much skips the first 200 years of ale history and doesn’t return to ale brewers until Ogle examines how microbreweries changed the American beer landscape just as dynamically as an earthquake might have.

Ogle’s story begins in the 1840s because that’s when beer surpassed spirits in popularity and an industry emerged. She tells a sometimes romantic tale of immigrants who successfully pursued the American Dream. (If you close your eyes you might see sepia-colored brewers toting bags of grain to a brewing kettle.)

How and why did they deliver us into a beer monoculture? Ogle makes it pretty straightforward: they developed beer suited to the American palate. Consumers were as complicit as brewers in the relentless march toward blander beer.

Did it have to happen that way? If brewery operators clung to the notion that every decision had to be based targeting a national audience and maximizing sales then it seems that way whether it was 1880 (“The men had no choice but to push their beer into distant markets”) or 1970 (when she writes brewers had “no choice” but to use additives because competition demanded lower prices).

The brewers who succeeded under these rules “recognized what is fundamental to any brewer’s success: the need for consistency… . so that each glass of their beer tasted the same every time.”

But consider this. She cites a report from The New York Times that “as long as the ‘greater part’ of the nation’s beer flowed down American gullets,the mostly German-born and bred brewers had no choice by the 1870s but to ‘modify the flavor of their beer to suit American palates’ rather than those of fellow immigrants.”

There are those words — no choice — again, but also the fact plenty of German customers were still drinking beer. Wouldn’t they have bought a traditional German product? For that matter, weren’t there English and particularly Irish immigrants who would have supported brewers of traditional ales like those sold in the United Kingdom?

As extensive endnotes and a massive bibliography indicate, Ogle was nothing if not thorough in her research. And she doesn’t have answers to those questions. It seems nobody collected, or at least saved, that information.

They are questions we ask today because even at a time that American industrial lager has become more like itself than ever before small-batch brewers in America have succeeded by catering to sometimes small niches.

Perhaps that’s why regulars in several Internet discussion groups – ones who would like the book to be called “The Rise and Fall of American Industrial Lager” – found Ogle’s account hard to swallow, and a variety of lively online discussions followed. It makes no sense to them that consumers would have embraced beer brewed with six-row barley malt (which they consider inferior) and adjuncts (mostly corn) rather than one with made traditional European (two-row) barley malt.

Yet Ogle documents time and again what happened to brewers who shipped beers with “too much barley” or ones that were too dark in color, and similar results weren’t acceptable for those who would become Beer Barons. The evidence it pretty overwhelming.

That she doesn’t vilify breweries who succeeded doesn’t mean she glorifies them. She documents business practices that certainly weren’t admirable and there is no better example of their imperfect vision than how they got broadsided by Prohibition — another subject covered in depth.

Not all of this is new to those who know American brewing history well, but the focus on the national brewers is different. Ogle offers a particularly telling comment from August A. Busch in 1920, shortly after Prohibition became national law. “We had to forget that we were brewers, bred in the bone and trained that way for years,” he told a reporter, a painful process that he likened to “Tearing trees up by the roots.” Once the people running the companies tossed aside their brewing roots was there ever any going back?

The drift toward beer with less flavor did not occur in a vacuum; by the 1950s flavor was out of favor. Ogle writes that drinkers asked for “an even less demanding version of American lager: a sexy vibrant beer that went down as easily as instant mashed potatoes or pudding and never asked much of its recipient.” Consumers were in charge, and the president of the Wahl-Henius Institute, a leading brewing school, told brewers they might prefer full-bodied, hoppy beers but they weren’t the ones buying the beer.

The trend never really stopped. Earlier this year the Wall Street Journal reported that from 1950 to 2004, the amount of malt used to brewed a barrel of beer in the United States declined by nearly 27 percent and the amount of hops in a barrel fell by more than a half. Some of this can be attributed to more efficient use of ingredients, but according to the Siebel Institute in Chicago the IBUs (a measure of bitterness) in industrial lagers have declined from between one-third and one-half in the last 20 years.

The Journal provided those numbers in a story that discussed flavor “creep,” in this case how Anheuser-Busch’s beer became less bitter over many years. “Through continuous feedback, listening to consumers, this is a change over 20, 30, 40 years,” said head brewmaster Doug Muhleman. “Over time, there’s a drift.” Because A-B carefully preserves its beers Muhleman could use a range of beers brewed between 1982 and 2003 to make his point. The reporter WSJ found the difference in taste between two beers brewed five years apart indistinguishable. Yet the difference between the 1982 beer and 2003 was distinct.

Imagine what would have occurred since 1870.

Ogle makes the ramifications clear in the last quarter of Ambitious Brew when she writes about the emergence of craft breweries and the mavericks who disrupted America’s beer monoculture. She recounts conversations we’ve never heard before and initiates new ones. Her affection for these brewers — understand that when she began she knew little about their beers — is apparent but doesn’t blur her historian’s vision. She makes it clear that craft brewers, like the immigrant entrepreneurs of the nineteenth century, are competing business operators and they don’t always talk like members of one big happy family.

Many might be happy buying the book for this thin slice of history, but would be silly to skip the first 257 pages. Industrial lagers still dominate in America although they no longer define American beer, and they frame many of the discussions the book has already produced. Eavesdropping on these sometimes spirited debates has been almost as entertaining as reading the book. They are just what a good history should provoke.

Ambitious by Jeff Beck

Here is a rich boy, a bit of a brat,

To him life’s just a fling.

Phi Beta Kappa and first in his class,

He’s treated just like a king.

And he says, “I’m not sure what it is I must have

So I guess I’ll just take everything.”

He’s just ambitious,

He’s not a bad man,

He’s just ambitous,

He’s not a bad man,

Just ambitious.

Whooah, yeah!

Just ambitious.

Here is a young girl, born down and out,

Locked up in jail when she was ten.

Now in the courtroom, she’s got a bit of doubt,

Sits on the judge side of the bench.

She’s just ambitious,

She’s not a bad girl,

She’s just ambitous,

She’s not a bad girl,

Just ambitious.

Whooah, yeah!

Just ambitious.

Here is a wild man who thirsts for a fight,

And his cool streak gets him by.

All these four letter words in his mind,

Here is a man who’ll survive.

He’s just ambitious,

He’s just a wild man,

He’s just ambitous,

He’s just a wild man,

Just ambitious.

Whooah, yeah!

Just ambitious.

Here is a wild man who thirsts for a fight,

Just ambitious.

All these four letter words in his mind,

Just ambitious.

Don’t you know, I’m just ambitious,

I’m not a bad man, just ambitious.

I’m not a bad man, just ambitious.

Whooah, yeah!

Just ambitious.

I’m not a bad man, just ambitious.

I’m not a bad man, just ambitious.

I’m not a bad man, just ambitious.