The amazing thing about the world is that contradiction can become unison in one self-devouring thought.
In case you won’t be able to tell, this blog might be a little random. But since I categorize it as thus, hasn’t it already lost the very meaning which the label wishes to produce?
it’s not that I’m a bad planner, but some things in the real world don’t end up looking or being as I planned them. Last night, I sought to surprise my Goldberry, my sweet love, with a foreign dessert that had astounded me earlier that afternoon per the chance of a self-proclaimed food-loving coworker. So I arranged a series of brown and green Mochi on a giant stone serving platter, all as the end of a night of failed surprises that were only surprising in their quiet failures. The Mochi was both chocolate and green tea, respectively.
And this is what got me, as it always does. Hearing about something green tea, whether it be a frappacino or ice cream or anything really, I automatically assume I will like it. The color alone fires neurons in the depths of my memory that say words like “mint” and “sweet” and “childhood toothpaste”… and then I fall face-first into the tombstone concrete of reality. Those little green-tea, mint-green Mochi balls weren’t very tasty. I’d call it green-tea deception.
I’m likely going to the movies this afternoon. 2012. I need to see it on the big screen. I had forgotten until this morning that I wanted to see it, so I don’t think it was influencing my thoughts last night, at least that I know of. But I was pondering wars, the world-sized ones, and wondering if we were edging nearer to one than we knew. I thought about how dark the future was, and how dim the past seems unless it seems different.
I’m reading Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, and it wraps around the Great War, and I remember how in the last hundred years, we’ve fallen into great wars sometimes with a sudden realization, sometimes in a slow and unnoticed roll. I thought what would happen if Iran and Israel started the world’s first nuclear war, and the sort of quicksand it would be sucking the rest of the world into the future of war. What changes would happen with about three-quarters less oil at our sticky fingertips? Collapse is an exaggeration, but life with stutter and stumble and try to reorganize itself - I see cities “collapsing” back in on themselves as everyone scrambled back from the suburbs into cities, suddenly rebuilt with trains and streetcars and the ability to walk where someone actually needs to go. How quickly could electric cars and nuclear power plants replace the standards of today, when we would be faced with their uselessness in the wake of the waiting war? I know I’m not making much sense. On the one side I don’t want to be the fear-mongering prophet with visions of the new Islamic Europe and an America filled with foreigners (as though we’ve ever not been that for the last 500 years)… but I also don’t want to be naive, thinking that I like green-tea Mochi when the q’s rub the p receptors on my tongue just the wrong way. The fear of dying, from war or flu or a car wreck… But everyone dies.
All because I want to be married to the woman I love and to maybe see children someday, and spoil grandchildren, and plan music and read books and make love and sleep in on Saturdays… Amazing how those things can be interrupted, postponed, or obliterated by the choices of others, and the chances of nature, and the changes of time.
I was chatting with my supervisor at work, and she was expressing her building anxiety over the holiday season, culminating in a flurry of ridiculous gift-check-giving and reconciling with budgets and people’s expectations. She admitted that she liked the fact that I saw straight through the situation and could question the foundational thought - the belief in required gift-giving.
She not only illustrated it with her family at Christmas, but also with her husband on her birthday. He had given her the same card two years in a row, and when she asked him if he knew that he had, he only pointed out that the convenience store in his office building only had a few cards to choose from.
Freely give, freely receive. I mean, take that seriously, and suddenly the requirements of decorum melt away. How different would our celebrations be if we didn’t receive piles of things that were useless, ugly, contrived, or worthless?
Not to shoot myself in the foot or bite some feeding hand, but I really have no interest in people giving us gifts for the wedding. I know nobody takes me seriously. “Who wouldn’t want to just be given a bunch of stuff?” But, that’s it - how many duplicated things would/will we get? How much more do I want people to come and celebrate, to dance and smile and talk and eat and tell us we have no idea what’s coming. Quit worrying about tuxes and bridesmaid dresses and sit-down meals and clinking glasses and people that tell me you have a wedding “for the presents”. How much better I feel about our wedding since we are paying for it, and we are planning to enjoy it. It is not an investment, it is not a production, it is not a ceremony - it is a party that is thrown to start a pair of lives becoming a life together.
Maybe my mind had more in it about this, but the other night at dinner (my second Thanksgiving-turkey dinner of the day), a dad of a daughter commented how he had already threatened, if the daughter got a tattoo, he would not pay for a wedding. I’m sure there was serious and joking mixed together, but I realized how sad that sounded. How much control was based on money, trying to keep someone from doing something that you didn’t agree with. I know I’ll be a dad of some flavor, worried about hot stoves and driving in the snow and meningitis and diabetes, but I really hope I don’t teach my children that money should be used as coercion. A family shouldn’t work like a tax bracket.
A wandering stream dies in the desert sand. Is that better than disappearing in the muddy Mississippi of life?
Just one last thought: What happens when you treat a sweet potato like a lumpy carrot rather than an orange russet? I just wonder how many things we treat like sweet potatoes, only eating one day a year covered with browned marshmallows… how much of life is a traditional dish instead of a misunderstood vegetable.