Category: life

What’s Going On Here?

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“In America, men often work long hours even when they are already well off; such men, naturally, are indignant at the idea of leisure for wage-earners, except as the grim punishment of unemployment; in fact, they dislike leisure even for their sons.  Oddly enough, while they wish their sons to work so hard as to have no time to be civilized, they do not mind their wives and daughters having no work at all.  The snobbish admiration of uselessness, which, in an aristocratic society, extends to both sexes, is, under a plutocracy, confined to women; this, however, does not make it any more in agreement with common sense”
-Bertrand Russell

A few sentiments that I feel, somehow, have some truth for today.

Cooking Time

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I spend a lot of time preparing food.  Both of us do, because for us, it is a priority.  We eat, probably 90% vegetarian, not because we don’t like meat, not at all, but for other reasons that include quality/price ratio and trusting food sources.  You should see us eat in Italy, where we tend to eat a lot of carne cruda, horse bresola, tons of fish, chicken from grandma and Piedmontese beef.  Also, one of my favorites, sfilacci di cavallo or dried shredded horse meat.
But let me get back to the idea of spending time cooking and preparing food.  There are a lot of romantic notions around about cooking together, sharing a meal, making a date night.  For us, it’s not really any of those things, it’s just the way we live.  We respect meal times, that is, eating at the right time for breakfast, lunch and dinner.  We never eat in the car (we don’t have one), we don’t eat standing, walking or on the train.  We don’t eat dinner at 5Pm or lunch at 11AM.

I found this interesting:

Society at a Glance 2011 – OECD Social Indicators (www.oecd.org/els/social/indicators/SAG)

Released yesterday, the report looks at 25 economically developed countries and found (among other things), that those of us in the US spend the least amount of time preparing food — 30 minutes per day compared to an average of 52 minutes per day.  NBC’s Brian Williams commented, “this despite our having no less than 500 cooking shows on TV.”
The report also notes that Americans spend the third least amount of time eating despite being the most obese.

So what’s going on?  People want to watch cooking shows, but not cook?  The time spent cooking is time spent watching the show?  Who knows.  All I know is that I don’t need much more than the internet and my own intuition to make something good in the kitchen.

 

Life Without Principle

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Life Without Principle is an essay by Henry David Thoreau that offers his program for a righteous livelihood.

Themes

  1. Don’t cheat people by conspiring with them to protect their comfort zones.
  2. Don’t make religions and other such institutions the sort of intellectual comfort zone that prevents you from entertaining ideas that aren’t to be found there.
  3. Don’t cheat yourself by working primarily for a paycheck. If what you do with your life free-of-charge is so worthless to you that you’d be convinced to do something else in exchange for a little money or fame, you need better hobbies.
  4. Furthermore, don’t hire someone who’s only in it for the money.
  5. Sustain yourself by the life you live, not by exchanging your life for money and living off that.
  6. It is a shame to be living off an inheritance, charity, a government pension, or to gamble your way to prosperity – either through a lottery or by such means as prospecting for gold.
  7. Remember that what is valuable about a thing is not the same as how much money it will fetch on the market.
  8. Don’t waste conversation and attention on the superficial trivialities and gossip of the daily news, but attend to things of more import: “Read not the Times. Read the Eternities.”
  9. Similarly, politics is something that ought to be a minor and discreet part of life, not the grotesque public sport it has become.
  10. Don’t mistake the march of commerce for progress and civilization – especially when that commerce amounts to driving slaves to produce the articles of vice like alcohol and tobacco. There’s no shortage of gold, of tobacco, of alcohol, but there is a short supply of “a high and earnest purpose.”