My Life

My Life
Originally uploaded by Tokyorosa

The Photo

For the past month, my life has looked like this. That's the TV with all the cable channels in Judi and Paul's TV room. Those are my tennis shoes propped up on the coffee table. That's me in Judi's chair, watching TV. That's my life in housesitting mode when there is cable TV in the house.

See, I grew up with television and if you put me in a room with a TV set, I will do nothing but try to make friends with it. It's sad, I know.

The Cheese Fondue

So, yes, we had cheese fondue for dinner last night, and it was very good. It's the second time in my life that I've made cheese fondue from scratch (the first time, about sixteen years ago give or take, was a miserable failure). Usually we buy the packaged stuff (which is quite good) or Dave just eats it when he goes to visit his mother (since she is quite adept at cheese fondue).

I was telling Kelly yesterday that the first time I tasted cheese fondue (at Dave's parents' house when we were in high school), I was still trying to be nice and polite (cut me some slack, I was a teenager), so I didn't spit it out. I actually managed to choke some of it down--but it was a struggle. If you had asked me for an honest opinion of cheese fondue based on that first experience, I would have said that it was one of the most disgusting things I'd ever put in my mouth. And yet, a mere twenty-two years later, I actually really like the stuff.

The truth is that a lot of the stuff that Dave's family ate was unfamiliar to me. Most things that most white people ate was unfamiliar to me. I really looked at white peoples' food with a kind of anthropologist's eye. I didn't grow up with foods like cheese fondue, so it was really strange and more than a little unappealing. White peoples' children ate things like sugary breakfast cereals and granola bars. They ate packaged things like frozen Eggo waffles and Lunchables. They ate brand-named canned goods. It was strange to me. It was more than a little strange to me.

Bizarre Foods

There's a show on cable, on the travel channel (capital T? capital C?), called something like Bizarre Foods. I can't stand this show. The host is an unappealing, poorly socialized, hairy-knuckled mouth breather, and he goes around the world eating various foods and passing judgment. Often the food he samples isn't really that bizarre. I mean, yes, he does sometimes choke down maggots or tarantulas, but the majority of the time it's not that damned bizarre. The other night for example, he was in St. Petersburg and his take on bizarre Russian food included sausages and pickles. You know, sausage like you'd get in a deli and freaking pickles. He was eating good old pickled cucumbers heavy on the dill and garlic. I was, like, what's the Russian for Vlassic dill pickle? I was, like, that guy's an idiot.

So where was I going with that? Oh, yeah. So, as a child, I was kind of like that bizarre foods guy. Things like yogurt and brie and artichokes and asparagus were really out there. I choked them down with all the trepidation of that bonehead host biting into teriyaki cockroaches. Cheese fondue was from another planet. In my own house, we ate all the normal things: pinto beans and fried potatoes and green chile, yes, but also beef tongue and heart and menudo with tripe and yummy, yummy pigs feet. And who could pass up calabacitas and verdulagas?

So we grow, right? So it goes, right?