We interrupt your usual lackadaisical one post a week with a blog chain! There are many desriptions of a blog chain, but it's basically a blatant attempt to bring new readers to your blog by writing about meandering topic. I'll be riffing off of Midnight Muse's post about salmon, I think. And smoking.
Oh, and produce!
I think it has to be a mark of adulthood to be excited about produce.
When I was a kid, and we'd go for some vacation to yet another boring landmark (with not a single arcade in sight) about some misguided explorer who had died along the way to a destination (where I'm sure he was expecting opium and cheap women, but who the plaques invariably cast as a starry eyed dreamer, bent on discovering the world for road-side diners and the more boring parts of textbooks). We'd inevitably find some long lost fruit stand. Abandoned except for a weather worn sign and a disaffected youth who oozed small-town teen resentment.
My dad would stop our full sized van (you remember the ones, they had the gas economy of a small tank and was made only slightly less uncool by dreams that it could be, with a paint job, some mags, and maybe a wicked red spoiler, look just like the van from the A-Team. They weren't 'crossovers', they gave no impression that they could do the Drakar rally or that they could handle the power if you dropped a hemi in it and tried to take down the local punks in an old school drag race. They were family-mobiles.) and get out excitedly. He and my mom would get bags and bags of cherries and apples and peaches and other things that were quite obviously not candy-bars.
They weren't even fruit roll-ups.
The rest of the trip would be them going through the produce, munching away, and always, always, trying to offer us fruit. As if it was some sort of treat! It must have been the trail fever, making them think they could pull a fast one like. What was next? Offering us asparagus instead of fries? A hot bath instead of a dip at the beach (also known as a near death experience with the coastal undertows)?
Vacation was clearly when the regimens of Healthy Eating were supposed to be loosened if not cast aside all together. Things should be deep fried, processed, re-processsed, post-processed, sugared, candied, and in other ways made to be only slightly less dangerous than injecting lard directly into the heart. Everyone knows that, especially children. It's something that must be written into our DNA : When vacation comes, you can eat anything and everything. Particularly those things that usually take a fair amount of wheedling to get otherwise. (It's my opinion that road-side attractions could save a lot of money on packaging and advertising if they just sold candied lard. It might be a bit of a tough sell at first, but I think the honesty would be refreshing.)
So it was quite alarming when my wife and I went for a road-trip to Alberta. Which, to anyone not from Canada, means absolutely zilch, what's important to note is that we had to go through many small towns filled with angst-affected youth manning all manner of fruits stands. And I'll be pickled if we didn't stop at some of them, hurry out of air-conditioned oasis and excitedly collect all manner of fruits. I think it was somewhere near my sixth cherry when I realized that unless I found a deep fryer to throw this fruit in post-haste, I'd lose all connection to my childhood.
Unfortunately I was interrupted when I had to dodge a full-sized van that, with a paint job and a wicked spoiler, would be a dead ringer for the A-Team van.
The next blogger in this chain will be TBFKA Taosbound, who will have the unenviable task of making sense of this and writing something that, unlike this post, will have to resemble English.
blog@cathsmith.com
My Midnight Muse
periodically.org
(The Blog Formerly Known as) Taosbound
Virtual Wordsmith
The Death Wizard Chronicles
Food History
Kappa No He
A piece in the puzzle
Sound Off Blog
Virginia Lee: I Ain't Dead Yet!
awchain
Showing posts with label blogchain. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blogchain. Show all posts
Thursday, August 30, 2007
Thursday, June 07, 2007
Comfort
So I'm in this blog chain started by a few folks over at the Absolute Write forums. I'm not entirely sure what it is. It brings to mind the chain gang, or possibly a log chain, or a chain letter. None of these are very encouraging, I'll grant. Except for the log chain, which I assume is some sort of forestry equipment. Come to think of it, if you're a staunch environmentalist, a log chain would probably put a fly in your totally-organic-100%-ethical-premium-grade-flaxseed-honey comb-wheat-grass-and-hemp oatmeal.
But I digress.
The idea is to write a blog post, then have the blog after you use an element from your post in their post, and so and so forth until, presumably, all topics of discourse and enlightenment have been spent, or until the chain gets to the last person. Whichever comes first.
The seed of todays topic comes from tjwriter who wrote about comfort zones, encyclopedias, being the strange new person at work, and posting your fiction where anyone can read it, and possibly comment. So many topics to touch upon.
Comfort is a fine thing. When on an airplane, the attendant often asks, "Are you comfortable?". It's the quality we look for in sensible shoes, queen sized mattresses, and often (heart-attack inducing) food. It's also the mainstay of most charitable organizations. Particularly the ones that go into war torn parts of the world offering something along the lines of 'comfort and succor'. Succor being a word that sounds like the punchline to a slightly off-colour joke, needs a solid, life affirming word like Comfort, right beside it, to give it heft. And to stop the peanut gallery from snickering.
Comfort of course, has a dark side. Besides the aforementioned flight attendant. "Are you comfortable?" is also a question posed by a dentist, holding say, a large and seemingly overpowered drill, or that sneaky KGB interrogator before he proceeds to attach the electrodes. I imagine it might be the same phrase that a Manhattan shrink would ask before delving into your psyche to reveal that yes, you do have a fetish for Big Bird and are maybe too attached to your 1983 collection of World Lacrosse Player cards.
But comfort can be lulling. It's the lazy boy chair that convinces you to take a nap instead of cleaning the gutters, the tryptophan rich turkey that knocks you out before raking. It's something that we strive to get, comfortable, but something that we are constantly trying to escape. Hence the term Comfort Zone. Zone makes everything seem more serious, even dangerous. You don't want to stay in a zone too long. Zones are created by totalitarian regimes with an extensive military police force and the blind eye of the UN. Must get away from your comfort zones.
Which isn't bad in and of itself. Outside of comfort zones is its unimaginative opposite, discomfort: nature's way of telling you that you are doing something different.Something new. Maybe not exciting, maybe not fulfilling, but new. And on balance, don't most of us prefer to hoard what we have rather than risk it for something better. Because better is a constantly hungry idea. Everything and anything can get better (all references to New Coke excluded). It seems like a bit of a treadmill.
So one is left with the two choices, the lazy boy or the treadmill. And while one might be alluring, the other is better for you (there's that word). Even if the experience isn't all it's cracked up to be, there is always something to learn from it, even if that something is: "Don't do that again".
The road to betterment, the path outside the comfort zone, is a journey of growth (oh my, using that term makes me want to grow a beard and form my very own cult, or possibly write a series of self-help books that can boiled down to "There is no try, only do"). Which is what we are all geared to do. Grow mentally, emotionally. We get antsy in that lazy boy. The comfort becomes uncomfortable. Not in any way that people usually measure comfort. But in nebulous, I-feel-antsy-like-I-shouldn't-have-had-that-fifth-cup-of-coffee antsy.
So one way to think of it is that one moves outside one's comfort zone to once again achieve comfort, with oneself, at least. And this is where the whole lazy boy treadmill analogy kind of falls apart.
Next up on the chain is Food History, which I hope posts a long polemic on the wonders of macaroni and cheese.
Virginia Lee: I Ain't Dead Yet!
writing@cathsmith.com
hunt & peck
Life, Writing, and Other Things
periodically.org
Food History
A View From the Waterfront
Organized Chaos
Willibee
The Road Less Traveled
awchain
But I digress.
The idea is to write a blog post, then have the blog after you use an element from your post in their post, and so and so forth until, presumably, all topics of discourse and enlightenment have been spent, or until the chain gets to the last person. Whichever comes first.
The seed of todays topic comes from tjwriter who wrote about comfort zones, encyclopedias, being the strange new person at work, and posting your fiction where anyone can read it, and possibly comment. So many topics to touch upon.
Comfort is a fine thing. When on an airplane, the attendant often asks, "Are you comfortable?". It's the quality we look for in sensible shoes, queen sized mattresses, and often (heart-attack inducing) food. It's also the mainstay of most charitable organizations. Particularly the ones that go into war torn parts of the world offering something along the lines of 'comfort and succor'. Succor being a word that sounds like the punchline to a slightly off-colour joke, needs a solid, life affirming word like Comfort, right beside it, to give it heft. And to stop the peanut gallery from snickering.
Comfort of course, has a dark side. Besides the aforementioned flight attendant. "Are you comfortable?" is also a question posed by a dentist, holding say, a large and seemingly overpowered drill, or that sneaky KGB interrogator before he proceeds to attach the electrodes. I imagine it might be the same phrase that a Manhattan shrink would ask before delving into your psyche to reveal that yes, you do have a fetish for Big Bird and are maybe too attached to your 1983 collection of World Lacrosse Player cards.
But comfort can be lulling. It's the lazy boy chair that convinces you to take a nap instead of cleaning the gutters, the tryptophan rich turkey that knocks you out before raking. It's something that we strive to get, comfortable, but something that we are constantly trying to escape. Hence the term Comfort Zone. Zone makes everything seem more serious, even dangerous. You don't want to stay in a zone too long. Zones are created by totalitarian regimes with an extensive military police force and the blind eye of the UN. Must get away from your comfort zones.
Which isn't bad in and of itself. Outside of comfort zones is its unimaginative opposite, discomfort: nature's way of telling you that you are doing something different.Something new. Maybe not exciting, maybe not fulfilling, but new. And on balance, don't most of us prefer to hoard what we have rather than risk it for something better. Because better is a constantly hungry idea. Everything and anything can get better (all references to New Coke excluded). It seems like a bit of a treadmill.
So one is left with the two choices, the lazy boy or the treadmill. And while one might be alluring, the other is better for you (there's that word). Even if the experience isn't all it's cracked up to be, there is always something to learn from it, even if that something is: "Don't do that again".
The road to betterment, the path outside the comfort zone, is a journey of growth (oh my, using that term makes me want to grow a beard and form my very own cult, or possibly write a series of self-help books that can boiled down to "There is no try, only do"). Which is what we are all geared to do. Grow mentally, emotionally. We get antsy in that lazy boy. The comfort becomes uncomfortable. Not in any way that people usually measure comfort. But in nebulous, I-feel-antsy-like-I-shouldn't-have-had-that-fifth-cup-of-coffee antsy.
So one way to think of it is that one moves outside one's comfort zone to once again achieve comfort, with oneself, at least. And this is where the whole lazy boy treadmill analogy kind of falls apart.
Next up on the chain is Food History, which I hope posts a long polemic on the wonders of macaroni and cheese.
Virginia Lee: I Ain't Dead Yet!
writing@cathsmith.com
hunt & peck
Life, Writing, and Other Things
periodically.org
Food History
A View From the Waterfront
Organized Chaos
Willibee
The Road Less Traveled
awchain
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