The Higher Culinary Experience

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/18/opinion/bruni-dinner-and-derangement.html?ref=columnists

This piece about how ritualistic certain fancy-pants restaurants have become made me flinch--"make a memory" of water?--but it caused me to realize how grateful I am to not suffer such eccentricities. The article goes on to explain all the odd things one must do in particular restaurants and how the culture has changed to be so centered around the rituals of food.

(This seemed very related to our current topic of the "Carnivore's Credo.")

I enjoyed his many examples and the colorful language he used in a simile: "I felt like a...bamboozled cheese."

He very much pursuaded me to stay in my happy middle-class food district out of the $245 person meals of the higher up.

Pardon me while I go find a cheeseburger.

A Quiet Life

Maybe we've gotten it wrong all along. Maybe they do have it better than we, we the hearing.

In Mrs. Fortune's class freshman year, we went around the room stating which of the five senses we would give up if we had to. Thirty students: not one said hearing.

We find so much enjoyment in the music, the conversation, the ambience of life. But how many times have we complained about a music station we don't like, a person who babbles incessantly, a thunderstorm that kept us awake at night? How many times have we wished away a semi's belting honk or a fire alarm's eerie buzz? How often have we escaped from a crowd into a deserted room just for a moment of silence?

We resent those noisy, distasteful places that blare fuzzy, awful songs from terrible speakers; we wear noise-blocking headphones to escape the constant whir of machinery. We wish we could get those irritatingly catchy, reproachful songs from our heads (how often do we wish to heavens we had never heard "Friday"?).

A "disabled" deaf person has none of these complaints. No air horn surprises, no dreadful child's wails, no horrific explitives.

It's so quiet, so peaceful to imagine what life must be like for the deaf.

Don't Trust Them!

They call them man's best friend. They call them lovable, adorable, furry.

I think they're awful.

Maybe it isn't fear--maybe it's grown more into a hatred, a loathing vengeance against perhaps innocent canines--but they're awful nonetheless.

I must have been only six or seven years old. My father brought home a puppy, a Shiba Inu. Adorable! Its little brown eyes gazed from a fuzzy, striped black-and-white face. But it was only a demon in disguise.

Not long after it manipulated its way into our home, it began ravaging us tenants with its fits of barking, its snarls, its hungry eyes. I shall never forget the way its nose curled up like bunching fabric caught in a sewing machine, the way its eyes glared out at anyone, everyone!

It was hard enough living with a demon, but no one warned me that they bite.

I came home to find that my gum--my lovely, sweet BubbleTape still in the pink case--was stolen from its countertop home. Dakota, I thought with clenched teeth, heading for said beast's cage. I've no idea how the little monster reached my gum as he was no taller than my knee, but I saw the flash of pink cradled within his paws.

Like any candy-craving seven-year-old, I angrily reached in to grab my chewing joy.

But it bit me. The demon bit me. My hand, penetrated in three pale dents where its teeth had gripped, throbbed and faded like an Icy-Hot.

My father, ever the disliker of animals, came to my aid and went for the beast, but it bit his thumb harder--I still remember the blood ebbing from his thumb into the sink.

That demon was put down soon after, and thank heavens we had it so for it might have eaten me had it been given the chance.

So now I see those little monstrosities, those ones every person likes to coo at, and I twinge in repulse. Some find it amusing to place their animal in my face, those slobbering cheeks dripping like a broken hose, and I can only feel a mix of fear, horror, and need for revenge.

Only recently have I begun to heal from this fear. Only a few times in my life have I ever been able to trust a canine enough to pet its shaggy head. Maybe one day I'll forgive them. But I still see those snarling eyes.

Skyscraper

This song seems quite appropriate now--both on a personal and a patriotic level.

"Skies are crying, I am watching
Catching tear drops in my hands
Only silence, as it's ending
Like we never had a chance

Do you have to make me feel like
There's nothing left of me?

You can take everything I have
You can break everything I am
Like I'm made of glass
Like I'm made of paper
Go on and try to tear me down
I will be rising from the ground
Like a skyscraper
Like a skyscraper

As the smoke clears, I awaken
and untangle you from me
Would it make you, feel better
to watch me while I bleed?

All my windows still are broken
But I'm standing on my feet

You can take everything I have
You can break everything I am
Like I'm made of glass
Like I'm made of paper
Go on and try to tear me down
I will be rising from the ground
Like a skyscraper
Like a skyscraper

Go run, run, run
I'm gonna stay right here, watch you disappear

Go run, run, run
Yeah, it's a long way down
But I am closer to the clouds up here

You can take everything I have
You can break everything I am
Like I'm made of glass
Like I'm made of paper

Go on and try to tear me down
I will be rising from the ground
Like a skyscraper
Like a skyscraper

(Like a skyscraper)

Like a skyscraper
Like a skyscraper"

Clearly Demi Lovato remembers the falling of the Twin Towers and, alluding to the Freedom Tower set to be finished by 2012. Though it seems a poor choice to build a skyscraper that symbolizes two others that were attacked (rather like a challenge), it is to be built with safer measures than the original World Trade Center. The song mentions being "made of glass" and how the "smoke clears" just as it was in 2001. It is a song of strength: "Go on and try to tear me down/I will be rising from the ground" to give hope for the 9/11 victims' families.*

It also envelops America on a personal level--how though we may be struggling financially ("made of paper"), we can still stand strong together to rise up from the ashes.

*song may be taken completely out of context

How DO I Write?

I see a little girl with pretty pigtails or a quiet bridge laced with vines. Sometimes I sketch it first; sometimes I feel a color and select a matching-hued notebook from my hoard. Some things are surefire inspiration each time like warm summer rain; some are flickering lightbulb ideas that pop in sudden bursts like a touching line.

Some days I can plan to write with my special writing songs' aid ("Never Stop" and "Bandoneon Acorazado" have never failed me--so helpful in November when I'm churning out sixteen hundred words a day), but some days I must pack my bags and grab my passport to start the journey at the spur of an instant.

Some days I use a clicky pencil to do deeper, more thoughtful pieces as it gives me a moment while writing to plan the next word; a Pilot pen is my rapid-fire beast for sputtered bursts on other days. Many aeons ago I used a miniature laptop to spill forth my ideas, but the poor thing was in an amnesiac accident and had to be retired. As of late I've discovered how the dusty musk--like a deliciously old book--of a typewriter keeps me punching away at the keys.

Some days I have to wrack the "guys in the sweatshop," as Stephen King so rightly wrote, yet others I find myself scrambling for the nearest notebook to pour down my whim-of-the-moment thoughts and watch it come alive like a Phoenix smouldering from the ashes.

Clouded Words

It's funny attempting to unscramble the cyphers of confusion wrapped up in some of these addresses, these vague ideas that sound so clever yet have little meaning.

Even in this mess, however, there is honest writing. Ronald Reagan clearly stated that he wanted to ease the Soviet threat by making shields to block missiles, and he adds that "It wouldn't kill people, it would destroy weapons."

I keep hoping we will one day have an Average Joe for a president, one who would gladly announce, "Yes, I'll fail you lots of times. But this is what I wanna do." And he would then in very short words and plain steps state his plan to help America. And who knows? Maybe it'll happen.

So Many Ways To Say It

This summer I read a lovely book called The Five Love Languages for Singles by Gary Chapman. The book is not fancily written nor difficult to pore over; indeed, it is perhaps the most simplistic book I've read in a very long time.

The Five Love Languages is just as its title suggests: the five different ways of communicating love to others: through time, touch, words, gifts, or service and which of these is most effective for every different person.

It was a wonderfully relatable book as it featured a bountiful supply of real stories about real people and their real struggles. It has caused me this summer to see people in a very different light.

This novel explains how to determine a friend's love language and how to fill it--complimenting a friend whose language is words, giving a hug to a friend whose language is touch, and so on. This has made friendship take on a different perspective for me; now I want to find out my good friends' languages and be able to make them feel loved.

I've been able to rebuild a broken relationship with my dad, hold tight to a best friendship that is falling apart, and make an outcast feel a little more wanted just by giving her a hug.

It's so simple.

Well, I'm off to find another way to tell my recently returned sister that I love her.