Two by five
Not five-by-five for several reasons. First of all, I’m not five fridays behind. Secondly, five-by-five in Buffy-speak is perfectly square, and this week’s been all kinds of parallellogram.
Crazy? Aye. There’s been some insanity in all areas. There was work, there was skating, there was my mom tripping over a rug and breaking her kneecap. Then the cat got a bath. The dog got a bath. Then the two of them snuggled together and napped. Like I said: it’s wacky week around here. No pictures, though, as they were sleeping together in my lap.
And now after a winter of strange warm weather, there’s a slight chance of snow and that just seems so… odd. Welcome (and doubted, of course) but odd.
And the oddest thing of all? The fives–both this week and last week–are pretty cool.
- Do you believe in God or a higher power?
This may sound odd, but I don’t really know. The real question people are asking when they ask about God is ‘Do you think life has a point?’ And I’m not so sure about that either.
If you’re asking if I believe in a white, snowy-bearded, wise-looking man who whispers in the ears of saints, priests, and popes; looks into the hearts of every person; and created the world in 6 24-hour days? I’m pretty sure that would be a ‘no.’ That explanation has never made sense to me–not in bible study, not later in confirmation class, and certainly not once I’d taken enough history and science to think critically.
What gets me over the logic barrel, usually, is the proliferation of religion. Monotheistic religion, polytheistic religion, headless religion. Regardless of configuration, a popular tenent of most faiths is that their vision of ‘higher power’ is valid.
At times, I’ve been willing to accept an explanation that considered all higher powers myriad faces of the same Universal Power. But the fact is that the majority of the many faiths do not accept that sort of generalization. The One True Way and all that.
So I’m left with an array of choices, similar, yes, but too strict in their own interpretations to allow for compromise. And what do I do when I see one unreasonable option after another parade past?
Well, lately, I’ve been choosing nothing. Which I suppose is something–agnosticism, athiesm. But it’s not really, because I believe that perhaps there is something. That something is the thing that makes all sorts of people search and pray and speak in tongues and confess and study and devote and sacrifice and tithe. It’s something that makes people at least want to behave, and imbues them with guilt when they cannot. It builds communities and takes in the poor and helpless, and at the same time, divides neighbors and creates stigmitism and breeds intolerance and hate.
It’s this enormously powerful thing, religion. Believing in something. I don’t know why we do it. But we are driven there somehow. The driver? Is god.
- Are good and evil just concepts, or real powers in the universe?
Good and evil are largely hypothetical concepts we apply to standards of behavior, sometimes in very arbitrary ways. Most things–and almost all people–are neither (not purely, though folks certainly lean heavily one way or the other). They’re just labels. I find I have trouble being on board with the concepts of heaven and hell even less than I can reconcile the whole ‘god’ issue.
- What is your view on forgiveness?
People deserve forgiveness when they made a mistake and are genuinely sorry for it. And not just sorry they got caught.
But other than that, I don’t really think there’s some moral imperative to turn the other cheek. That’s the kind of crap that gets you nowhere (at best) and gets you abused or taken advantage of (at worst). No positives there.
- Do organized religions do more harm than good?
Obviously. I don’t think a lack of diety would necessarily lead to a reduction of harm–people do bad things, for all sorts of crappy reasons, most of which we haven’t figured out how to resolve completely. But I think religion’s ability to divide people into vastly polarized groups is pretty scary, and creates an artificial divide where there really isn’t one.
Unfortunately, I also think that, in the absence of religion, we’d find some other way to separate ‘them’ from ‘us.’ We always do.
- If you had a day to spend playing God, what would you do?
I think I would really want an accounting of some of the crappier things that happen in the world. Cause I mean–seriously: little girl stuck in a well? John Lennon taking one in the chest? John Wayne Gacy? Cancer? I’d want an explanation of that shit.
- What is your favorite specialty restaurant (Italian, Mexican, Thai, etc.)?
Depends on the day. Almost never Italian or Ethopian, and rarely Chinese or Mexican.
- What do you order to eat there?
I like to try new things. It’s usually something with seafood or chicken if I trust the joint. (Some strip mall chinese places are not to be trusted with delicate things like shellfish.) I’m particularly fond of appetizers, small plates, and–funnest of the most fun–dim sum.
- What is your favorite specialty food or dish to cook?
Oh, this too is mercurial–changes with the seasons. In the wintertime I love making big pots of rich soups. Chowders, split pea, or gumbo. I like baking year-round. I like making fancy things with rouxs or high heat or reduction. I like to try things in the crock pot, and make pasta dishes like macaroni and cheese or lasagna (though, oddly, I don’t so much like to eat the pasta dishes. Weird.).
I like making cookies. I enjoy cooking breakfast, especially with a friend or lover on a lazy Saturday.
My great culinary talents, I’ve been told, lie in the making of sauces and cupcakes.
- If you could travel to the home country of your favorite specialty food, what would you do there?
The same thing I’d do on any vacation with exciting travel: have a fucking fantastic time. Eat and sight-see and investigate and explore a new place. Delight of delights!
- What is your worst experience with a specialty food restaurant?
Two experiences stand out in my mind (and generate rumbles of remembrance in the gut).
Ethopian food. I had never had it, and we went one day for a business lunch with some of the California crew. Now, I like spicy food and I’m always game to try new things. But I wasn’t prepared for this. It was… highly unattractive. A flat, spongy, greyish slab of bread laid on top of a pool of ground meat and beans that looked like… baby shit. It had a boiled egg, tinted bile-brown from the muck, protruding in the middle. Unidentifiable chunks studded the thin liquid.
But lots of unattractive things taste great, right? Not this. It looked bad. It tasted bad. It even smelled bad–the bread was made with fermented dough! I managed to choke a fair bit down, not wanting to hurt anyone’s feelings. I would later regret my attempts to save face as the starting appearance of the meal was similarly echoed at the end. As was the stinging spicy burn. Oi!
Time number two of bad foreign food experience would have to be the ‘off’ sushi spot. It was a conveyor place, unknown to us, and we were there at an odd hour. After eating quite a few plates of identifiable and unknown items, both my roommate and I returned home to 2 full days of absolute gastronomic hell. I was briefly off the sushi, even.