I’m starting to feel a little burnt out on writing about food.

It’s not that there is no inspiration left, because for one, if you’re writing and you like it you can definitely come up with pretty much anything and Frankenstein it up till you’re blue in the face.  Also, it’s food: certainly there is no dearth of food in the world to be  writing about, right?

Scratch that: apparently people living in famine-affected areas and anorexics would have a problem with that statement.

But well, food is just not that exciting a topic.  Or at least it’s just not doing it for me.  Maybe if I were the recipe kind of person I would share a recipe a day and you’d all coo and ooh and ahh and squeal with my recipes.  Or alternately you would blame me because the recipe should have called for coarse salt or more vinegar or less flour and ew!  You put raisins in that?

Basically, you would do the same thing I do with every recipe I come across.  Try it; tweak it; proclaim your Frankenstein to be better than the original.

Anyway, I guess it just feels a little more like homework than usual around here to do ye olde NaBlo this month.  And you may be saying to yourself, “Well, you do have free will, you know.  Why don’t you just stop?”

I guess I could.  I could do many things, including stopping the NaBlo’ing this month.  Except that it’s already July 23rd and I can definitely tough it out for another eight entries.  But I just felt I owed it to those of you who stop by every day and might have been wondering just how much lamer some of these entries can get to write something like this by way of… um… apology or explanation, I suppose.

For the record, and just so I can get my food in anyway, IKEA’s Swedish meatballs are truly, delightfully, evilly good. Eating them with the sauce and the mashed potatoes and a generous helping of lingonberry jam while staring at a lovely blue wall with pretty, bold patterned accents almost makes me forget that this is a place that masquerades as the ideal basic unit in ancient Greece– the Oikos— but then dumps you in the cold, overwhelming marketplace and entices you into buying lots of cheap stuff which you suddenly think you need.

IKEA is like a politician’s promise– sounds good and makes you feel better while you’re there, but as you walk away you realize there is very little of it that is truly useful to your everyday life, despite all the assurances to the contrary.  And sometimes that which is most useful only ends up being useful for a short period of time before it breaks down into its separate and cheapie particle-board components, leaving you high and dry.

__________

I know I don’t often get political in here.  In fact, I never get political in here because it makes me uncomfortable.  I consider myself a social liberal with a fiscally conservative viewpoint, and with some (dare I say it?) libertarian tendencies.  As in, I believe very much in free will and personal responsibility and resent much government control/glorified babysitting– I DO NOT want to be holed up somewhere in Montana with a giant cache of guns because I believe that strongly in my second amendment right.  I don’t think that there is one party label that fits me, consequently, and I resent politics for that very reason.

Hmm… come to think of it, that’s also the reason I don’t get political in here.  It’s an awkward conversation, because although you would think it’s about the facts, it always ends up being about feelings and about taunts and about alliances– regardless of who is truly affected by the outcomes of political discourse.  It is, I guess, truly about the polis, the city-state, and less about the people themselves.  Incidentally, as with in modern society, the interests of the oikos and of the polis are directly at odds most of the time– it’s the stuff of Greek tragedy.

But although there is change coming –and don’t you believe otherwise, because we need it and because it’s time– there is still frustration in me and in many.  There is frustration in me about the public eating blindly what they are fed, and neglecting to realize that in the end we are the ones who are affected by the decisions of those few in power.

I will stop for now– I am afraid I may have alienated some of you and baffled the rest.  Keep calm and carry on.  I know I will.

Oo look!  Dancing!

23 Jul This entry was published on July 23, 2008 at 8:48 pm and is filed under NaBloPoMo, Soapboxing. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.