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Today's post features an essay about a film I saw last week.

There was a time in my life when I enjoyed working in food service.  Now is not that time.  I do not like touching tomatoes anymore.  I do not like making salads.  I despise the smell of pickles and coconut--separately or mixed together.  I do not like melting butter in the microwave and mixing it with minced garlic and brushing it on pieces of french bread.  I do not like seving quiche with a light dusting of paprika to give it some color.

I have come to the painful realization that after about 5 years of work in professional kitchens there are some things that I will never learn.  I will never learn that when you put something in the oven you are supposed to remember to take it out.  I will never learn when you need to use a metal spoon in a ceremic mixing bowl and when you need to use a wooden spoon in a metal mixing bowl.  I have come to realize that I do not care if my chicken oxidizes.  Let it oxidize, I say.  I do believe that is the ultimate end of all chicken, whether it gets digested or not.

Today I poured some ancient beans into a bucket that had paint in it.  I was going to write POISON on the bucket before I threw it away, because if a homeless person decided to steal the bucket from the trash and eat the beans he would be sickened and would probably die.  But I decided, why bother?  There were globs of oily red paint floating in the beans.  And it smelled like rancid fat and turpentine.  Anyone who would eat that is probably suicidal anyway.  Or they need a new nose.  Or maybe a blind person who also could not smell would eat them, but how could they find them in the trash to begin with?  It is indeed perplexing.

Last week me boss said to mix the basic cornbread recipe first before adding the other ingredients.  Today he told me that it was silly to do that, he always mixes them all at once.  Yesterday my boss told me to buy longhorn cheddar cheese.  I did.  Today he said that he never buys longhorn cheese--it is too expensive.  he asked me why I had not purchased plain yellow cheese instead.  Passing over the fact that (outside of Russia) I have never heard of a kind of cheese called "yellow cheese" I reminded him that he had told me to buy longhorn cheese yesterday.  I know that he reminded me of this because I have never heard of longhorn cheese before in my life.  I thought it was a brand.  Apparently it is actually a kind of cheddar.  My boss sighed heavily and turned away, "I guess I have to tell you how to do everything!" he said.  "I wish you would," I thought.  In Russia there are only three kinds of cheese: yellow cheese, white cheese, and The Greasy Soft Cheese (That Comes in the Round Thing with a Picture of a Cow on the Lid).  TGSC(etc.) is excellent with some crackers and a glass of cherry juice.  Sometimes, if you are rich, you can also buy real cheese imported from Australia.  Perhaps my boss would function better if we did business in Moscow.  He is thinking of moving away.  Why not move far away while he is at it?

My coworker and I dicussed the possibility of tasting some kahlua yesterday.  We decided that it might be nasty and then we would have wasted some good kahlua for nothing.  Actually, we had no way of knowing what defines a "good kahlua".  Our bottle is probably not in that category.  At any rate, we just put the bottle back on the shelf and had a glass of water instead.  A glass of water and a cold cinnamon roll from the refrigerator.  Then we crossed the road and died in the rain and mud and devestation.  Just to clarify, we only died on the inside.

Currently Listening Shine By Bond Gypsy Rhapsody see related

So, I left PHC and Virgina and came to UD and Texas and one of the perks was supposed to be that I was going to be closer to my family.  And it was going to be such fun to go home on the weekends and hang out and relax and get my studying done in peace and quiet and become a more successful and grounded college student than ever before.

But I forgot an important factor in this rather unrealistic expectation.  My family NEVER has peaceful and quiet weekends when we just hang out and relax and do our homework.  No, we feel the urge to go and do and live and experience and obtain from life that which may be obtained from life--at least life in Murchison, Texas.

At PHC, I spent every weekend slaving away in the kitchen, getting off work late, spending way too much time with David, Quinn, and Aaron, going home, crashing, barely making it to church, and finally getting around to weekend homework late Sunday afternoon, followed by worship, visiting, and bed.

Here in East Texas I spend my weekends going to parades, going to the State Fair, taking my grandmother out to lunch, babysitting my siblings while my parents go out of town, going to Singing Christmas Trees, singing in my church choir and performing a Christmas cantata, going shopping, putting up Christmas lights, spending a week at a beach house in Galveston, attending a Mason Jennings concert, etc.

But this last week was really unusual.  Because I went to the opera.  Basically just because I felt like it.  Do you ever get to go to the opera just because you feel like it?  I got home at about 1:00 in the morning Friday and my mother was sitting at her desk working on her computer and I walk in the house and she says, "So, would you like to go to the opera?"  To which I say, "Uh, sure" and I think, "Since when does our family just 'go to the opera' like going to Wal-Mart or something?  I feel so rich and upper-middle class and snobbish and so forth and so OF COURSE I AM GOING TO GO because it will be bad for my soul."  I think attending opera is to the soul what eating a pound of chocolate truffles is to the fat cells.  It is delicious.

So I went and saw the Barber of Seville and my entire family went too and since when is my entire family OLD ENOUGH TO SIT THROUGH an entire opera?  My little brother does not know Italian so he sat between mom and me so we could explain the opera to him.  (Because we do not know Italian either, but we can read the English text on the screen.)  And I really, really, wanted to be the one to explain it to him because I could have made it so interesting.  But he wanted mom to do it and so he heard this, "Oh, now the pretty lady is sad because the man she loves is pretending to be the man that she does not love so that she will fall for the other man that loves her and she is singing about doves in the springtime frolicking on lilac fields and how her heart is dancing in the aromatic breezes of early Spring," instead of what I could have told him: "See the lady up there, Jonathan?  Her name is Trixie and she has lost her pet dinosaur because everyone in the olden days had a pet dinosaur and those two nice men are going to help her find it.  The one in the green coat is the Crocodile Hunter's grandfather!!  And in the olden days he was called the Dinosaur Hunter.  And now the lady is collapsing on the couch because she ate too much candy and she is going to be sick--that's why they have to dim the lights now."  I can make opera so fun.  So very fun indeed.

So anyway.  I have a much coolier life than you do because I get all this and I still get to study Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Pieper, Homer, Virgil, Old English poets, and Sallust all in one semester.  Lucky, lucky me.

BE ADEQUITE.