Word: fear
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...Food donations in Paradise, Calif., were up fivefold. "We'll take a cup of kindness yet," we sing as we welcome a new year, and never more so than this time. Maybe as times get worse, we get better. Our pain makes us feel other people's too; our fear lets us practice valor; we are tense, and tender as well. And among the things we can no longer afford are things we never really wanted anyway, like the solitude of snobbery, and the luxury of denial...
Like 24 (Jack Bauer and his ticking-time-bomb scenarios return Jan. 11), BSG tests the morality and rationalizations of an age of fear. Roslin is idealistic but possibly blinded by belief; Adama is high-handed but often right to be that way. Even swashbuckling pilot Starbuck (Katee Sackhoff) is unstable as often as heroic. The Cylons, meanwhile, prove a fascinating society, racked with doubt and riven by debate over their religious mission...
Still, the rise in borderline diagnoses may illustrate something about our particular historical moment. Culturally speaking, every age has its signature crack-up illness. In the 1950s, an era of postwar trauma, nuclear fear and the self-medicating three-martini lunch, it was anxiety. (In 1956, 1 in 50 Americans was regularly taking mood-numbing tranquilizers like Miltown - a chemical blunderbuss compared with today's sleep aids and antianxiety meds.) During the '60s and '70s, an age of suspicion and Watergate, schizophrenics of the One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest sort captured the imagination - mental patients as paranoid heroes...
Borderlines are the patients psychologists fear most. As many as 75% hurt themselves, and approximately 10% commit suicide - an extraordinarily high suicide rate (by comparison, the suicide rate for mood disorders is about 6%). Borderline patients seem to have no internal governor; they are capable of deep love and profound rage almost simultaneously. They are powerfully connected to the people close to them and terrified by the possibility of losing them - yet attack those people so unexpectedly that they often ensure the very abandonment they fear. When they want to hold, they claw instead. Many therapists have no clue...
...branch out from bacon and put other meats in sweets. José Andrés of Washington's Minibar and Los Angeles' Bazaar serves foie gras surrounded by cotton candy. Ramon Perez, the pastry chef at L.A.'s Sona, added shrimp to his salted caramels for a sweet brininess--and a fear-factor thrill. Perez, who also serves apple lasagna with crispy bacon, is delighted by the mainstreaming of meat for dessert. "It means diners are trying to change their whole perception of food," he says. Or it just means we've learned to add sugar to everything...