Moody Monday

I've been thinking a lot about the nature of family lately--it's a constant theme in my life what with my troubled relationship with my mother--but my sister just visited this weekend so it got me thinking even more about what family means.

I'm nearly 10 years older than my sister, so we were never exactly close growing up. Sure, I babysat her, fed her, changed her diapers--but we were always too far apart in age to ever be real siblings. That has changed now that she's older and on her own. In a very real sense, it's like I just found out I had a sister a few years ago, because we don't really share too many childhood memories.

I'm very glad I have a sister, and that we have each other amidst all of the family craziness we share.  It's just odd being looked up to as a kind of surrogate mother-figure at times, and I'm not sure how I feel about it. She has different memories than I do of our mutual time at home (she was 8 when I left home at 18), and overall we have different influences given that we have different fathers and family histories. But for all of that, we have become close, at first mostly out of mutual disgust over the actions of our selfish mother, but more recently, we are starting to develop a relationship all our own.

All of this makes me realize how fortunate I am that I got out, and that I had the strength to get out, and stay out. I'm glad if I am an example for her that life can be lived in a (mostly) sane fashion, that you can build your own family if your real one sucks. I am sorry for her that she has no one, and I understand now why she has the boyfriend she does--she needs family! I wish I lived closer to her, I think it would do a world of good for her to have me nearby, and maybe even for my mother too--but if I moved back there it would ruin me, I would probably resent being cast in the role as everyone's rock, and my marriage would probably end over it because my husband can't stand their drama. Maybe I'm being selfish by wanting my own life; does that make me as selfish as my mother in the end, albeit in a different way?

It would be interesting to see a tv montage of what might have been had we never left Louisiana...I do think about that sometimes, probably more often than I should. But I have no regrets.

Have We Forgotten How to Do Everything?

If you don't already know, I listen to the Today Show while getting dressed in the morning because I like my daily dose of spite. Most days it's the same old yawn-inducing crap--some white child is missing, another kid succumbs to bullying, or some hack  has a new book out--ho-hum. Every once in a while though some truly asinine story will piss me off, and last week it was a story about cooking.

Cooking, you say? How could a brainless Today Show segment on cooking possibly piss you off? 

The segment was about how preparing your own meals at home can not only save you money, it can help you lose weight and be healthier.Then I overheard a credulous female voice saying, "Cooking is really not as difficult as people think it is."  DING DING DING!

Do you understand what pissed me off about the segment?  Well let me explain it anyway in excruciating detail.  

You see, preparing food has been around for EONS, and people have known how to do it forever--and yet we now seem to live in a unique time where we can fly airplanes, make Velcro, and tiny tiny batteries, yet people are apparently so retarded that they have to be reassured about cooking because they are afraid of it.  The act of cooking is apparently so foreign to the collective mainstream consciousness now that fucking John Stossel needs to be called upon to launch an investigative report called, "The Crisis of Cooking: Debunking the Myths'' or some shit.

Intriguing that this Crisis of Cooking comes at a time when there is unprecedented coverage of professional cooking on the Food Network and regular TV in the form of celebrity chef shows, food porn segments, food throw-downs and challenges. And don't forget The Biggest Loser, which tells me America hasn't forgotten how to eat, they just don't remember how to render raw foodstuffs edible for themselves.

After my instantaneous rage over the Crisis of Cooking segment subsided, I got to thinking about where we are at the beginning of the 21st century. There is no question that, by and large, we have forgotten the basics for sustaining human life in the even of a sudden collapse of our (unsustainable) economy--cooking, gardening, canning, hunting, gathering, sewing, dressing properly for winter. We have also forgotten how to be civil and polite to one another, another of my pet peeves, and a topic for another time. In essence, we have now become grunting mongrels who would turn on each other over the last Twinkie at the end of the world.

Maybe this is why there seem to be so many movies in the last decade about the zombie apocalypse, nuclear disaster, ice-age, and earth-destroying asteroids. I think these movies are desperately trying to calm our unconscious fears of surviving despite our lack of survival skills should we find ourselves in that situation! If civilization were rolled back to zero overnight by some random viral or supernatural event, these movies ask, what the hell would the paltry survivors do with themselves? Why, they would become truck-driving vigilantes who take over the nearest grocery store or shopping mall, content to barely eek out the rest of their pathetic lives at subsistence level on Twinkies (hell, those things last forever), that's what! 

Interesting that you never see anyone plant a garden and learn to peacefully fend for themselves in most of these movies. What you see instead is a consumerist culture fantasy, one where we can ransack grocery stores and shopping malls at will, pillaging and plundering the foodstuffs that we so desire, shooting those that stand in our way. Oh, the humanity! 

I'll end with words from Voltaire's Candide, which if you haven't read, you absolutely must go out and get a copy and read it. NOW.

Pangloss: "There is a concatenation of events in this best of all possible worlds: for if you had not been kicked out of a magnificent castle for love of Miss Cunégonde: if you had not been put into the Inquisition: if you had not walked over America: if you had not stabbéd the Baron: if you had not lost all your sheep from the fine country of El Dorado: you would not be here eating preserved citrons and pistachio-nuts."

Candide: "All that is very well, but we must go and work in the garden."