The Weekend in Foolish Attention

Bits and bytes of the week

Lotsa cooking shows. In the wave of new interest in cooking, I’ve been binging on cooking shows. There are a lot of these shows. This past week I dove into Iron Chef, Guy’s Grocery Games, Selena + Chef, Five Star Chef, Chopped, and Bobby’s Triple Threat. I am also getting back into all things Anthony Bourdain. I realized I was getting serious about it all when I found myself pausing episodes to jot down notes of things to try or techniques that were cool. Not ready for baking just yet but I’ll get there eventually.

At some point, it hit me that this specific new avocation is going to be expensive with all the cool gadgets needed except for the fact that the single best thing I saw this week was a pasta roller with guitar strings wrapped in sections that allowed the chef to both roll and cut his pasta. It was a device he made rather than purchased. Brilliant.

Loved it but it made me a little sick. I caught Poor Things in the theater by myself. Based on descriptions, we decided the ton of graphic sex wasn’t really mom’s thing. It’s brilliant, bizarre, and hysterical. Effectively a Frankenstein meets My Fair Lady (or, as a buddy called it “an NC-17 Edward Scissorhands) the protagonist Bella is a woman with a child’s mind, completely unsocialized and thus walks about the world with a single-minded self interest, a creature of curiosity and sexual hunger who becomes a whore as a part of her journey.

Turns out I was married to Bella which made the film a bit more uncomfortable than I anticipated. Still a freaking great movie.

Massages are GOOOOOD. Mom got me a massage gift certificate last Christmas; my sister got me another for my birthday. Both have been sitting on my desk for a year. This week, I received two 75-minute deep tissue massages within a week and, dude, I’m starting 2024 relaxed. Do yourself a favor and go get one yourself. It’s easy to forget how damn awesome they are (especially if you get someone who can beat you up without making you sore the next day).

2024 Predictions? In my newsfeed, I’m seeing a slew of articles predicting the dire things that are going to happen in 2024 and it occurs to me that most of couldn’t predict what’ll happen next week let alone an entire year. We rely on polls to determine election results but forget that they are so frequently wrong that it’s just slightly better than consulting a Magic Eight-ball®. Some of the future will probably be bad, some of it will be good, some of it will seem bad but will be made worse by overreaction and tantrums. Just like last year and the year before.

I predict that it will be a year filled with things happening. I’ll bet I’m on the freakin’ money!

Greta Thunberg is now twenty-one years old. I feel bad for her. The harsh reality is that we will fetishize and adore a self serious child ready to take on the system but rarely allow them to grow older gracefully. Kathleen Stock sums her up succinctly in a recent article in Unherd:

“…this is a young person of a totally predictable type: intelligent but also dogmatic, emotionally immature, somewhat socially challenged, and as yet unaware of the world’s ethical complexity. Her intense idealism, pomposity and black-and-white thinking are all developmentally appropriate, and especially so for someone on the autistic spectrum. And nor is it her fault that her mother is an opera singer, nor that her middle name is Tintin, nor that impressionable idiots keep nominating her for Nobel Prizes, nor that UN officials and world leaders seem desperate to make a heady symbol out of her.”

The rise of taking children seriously about their views on the world, their choice of identity, and their tantrums and demands is a relatively recent phenomenon. The difficulty arises when these children, told by parents, teachers, and in Thunberg’s case, the United Nations, that their opinions matter find out that as an adult, their opinions don’t really matter so much. That the world is cruel place in a lot of cases and that their youth no longer protects them. We are far less forgiving of adults than children which is why we keep extending the definitions of adulthood. It’s why 40 is the new 20 and what the fuck does that mean?

I hope her transition into adulthood is a good one but that isn’t always the case with someone so universally known.

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