Food of the Gods

It's well documented elsewhere, but Lord knows I am no domestic goddess. I hate cleaning the house (although I'll do it because the alternative, namely living in one's own filth, is not that great an option) and I don't "do" cooking. Occasionally I get a weekend or two of inspired, frenzied cooking activity, only to realize that my cooking a) sucks b) sucks even worse after it has acquired freezer burn from sitting undisturbed in the freezer for a month.

So I've decided while I don't have kids to worry about developing scurvy, rickets, failure-to-thrive or some other nutritional-deficit disorder, that I could just pop a multivitamin a day and live on microwavable food stuffs and to hell with fiber and fresh vegetables. No doubt I'm going to end up with gout and colon cancer, and as I sit in my hospital bed years from now averting my eyes from my colostomy bag and popping my allopurinol pills, I'll regret it, but hey, maybe I'll be like one of those freaky people who smoked two packs a day and drank gallons of bathtub gin throughout life and each pregnancy, went on to deliver normal babies, and lived to the ripe old age of ninety five, dying peacefully in her sleep with a normally sized and functioning liver and having never once been tubed, trach'ed, vented or otherwise artificially respirated.

Freakish end-of-life issues aside, I write now eating yummy masala dosa,
which is South Indian for tasty rice pancake filled with spicy potato goodness. There's actually a place in town which cooks authentic Indian food, except it's a hole-in-the-wall and you'd never see it unless someone pointed it out to you (which someone did, thank goodness). It's also surprisingly cheap, and if you can do without stellar service and cramped, diner-like atmosphere, it's a great place to eat. They even deliver which is the kiss-of-death for the budget conscious but lazy such as myself.

In other news, Pointless Pseudo-Intellectual Endeavors With Jamie Hour had me pulling out Kant's Critique of Pure Reason last night. I realized two things while suffering needlessly through the preface: 1) I can't handle more than twenty minutes of concentrated Kant reading at a time without my thoughts wandering to those of me imbibing massive amounts of liquor 2) I have no idea how I read this book in undergraduate school, and then went on to read two more of his works (although I suspect large quantities of liquor had something to do with achieving this feat, too).

Then again, this statement comes from someone with peculiar academic tastes. I remember spending weekends in my little senior thesis carrel in the Jane Bancroft library, with my little copy of Critique of Practical Reason in front of me and my stacks of Latin notecards at my side, feeling the glory of scholarly pendantry without actually ever achieving anything notable in academe. (Collector of random academic memorabilia that I am, I have kept certain tokens of my favorite objects of labor throughout my meandering decades of school, including an eighth grade report on "Hawks" replete with a laboriously painstaking pencil sketch of a hawk on the cover, my hundreds of Latin notecards and all the exams, all of my essays plus comments for my undergraduate German Theology and The Historical Jesus class, plus a hard copy of a graduate school paper on George Eliot's Daniel Deronda that from inception to last draft I wrote in under twenty six hours straight. It was the paper that made me wish I could go back in time and write my undergraduate thesis on Daniel Deronda instead of Kant's concept of the highest good, because who the hell is interested in reading that stuff?)

I still have no idea what Kant was saying about pure practical reason, and that kind of bums me out, because you'd think I would have learned something about my undergraduate thesis topic. Or maybe all the stuff I learned back then has been shoved out of my brain by all the algorithims I had to learn in nursing school, and the fact that I now have the responsibility of people's lives in my hands when I go to work like everybody at the hospital.

Speaking of work, I have to go to hospital pretty soon, a fact that reminds me of The First Noble Truth (something else I learned in undergrad): all is suffering.