#1 Dutiful Eating Can Be Delicious
When you saw “What I eat when my wife's not here,” you might have assumed the following: Chris’s wife does all the cooking, so when she travels, he eats like a savage. That is half wrong.
In fact, I do nearly all of the cooking in our home these days. When my wife travels, I do often eat like a savage, but not because I am a dumb man, helplessly unable to cook for myself.
When my wife is here, I try to make proper dinners that she will enjoy. I sometimes get busy and phone it in, but I can cook, and when I put in the effort, I am able to make very nice food. Earlier this year, I made cuisine from a different country each day for a week. When my wife came down for dinner, she found candles lit, the food plated, and music from the country in question playing in the background. (Search for “Indian restaurant music,” for example, and YouTube will oblige with three hours of ragas, tablas, and sitar in a single video.)
When my wife leaves, however, my priorities change from trying to make proper dinners to
Eating whatever leftovers are the oldest, so that they don’t go bad before we can get to them, and
Trying to eat in such a way as to maximize the removal of clutter from the fridge.
The first is rooted in a sense of duty. Wasting food is not cool. When my wife is here, my duty is to make her happy with proper meals. When she goes, I switch over to prioritizing not wasting anything. Some plant or animal gave its life to nourish me; I will not have that sacrifice be in vain by letting its leftovers rot.
Obviously my strong sense of orderliness is largely at work in number 2. The more little containers of leftovers I can remove in a single meal, the cleaner I can make the fridge.
Over the last two days, I really went for it:
Tuesday at dinnertime, I heated up a cast-iron skillet. Then I found the oldest thing in the fridge: a leftover smashed potato—the last of the ones I made for dinner last week. I chopped it up and threw it in the skillet.
The next-oldest was some canned spam. I cut some of it up into chunks and added it.
Then, a container of leftover corn beckoned. (Not just any corn, but delicious shoepeg corn in butter.) Should I? Yup.
Someone (probably me) left a single slice of American cheese partially unwrapped on a shelf, such that it was getting a little hard around the edges. Throw it out? Nope. I am not sure what animal American cheese comes from—perhaps it’s actually some sort of industrial byproduct—but I hate wasting food, so in it went.
A few pieces of leftover brisket? Why not! Chop chop chop and into the pan.
I stopped short of adding the leftover spaghetti, but I considered it.
I didn’t much care what it would taste like. I just wanted to accomplish my aims of not wasting food and reducing fridge clutter. But it turned out to be amazing! Truly tasty. So I did something similar the next night; it too was yummy, and now the fridge is a lot clearer. Mission accomplished.
And now my wife is back, so I can start cluttering up the fridge again with more dinner leftovers. The cycle of life goes on.
#2 Y’all is useful, y’all.
Unlike Russian, French, and plenty of other languages, English lacks a second-person-plural pronoun. We just have “you”; there is no you-plural. You just have to get it from context.
As you know, Southerners have come up with a solution: y’all. Northern sophisticates may sneer at this contraction of “you” and “all,” but it serves a valuable and necessary purpose. In fact, there are times when I myself use it, even though I was born and bred in the Northeast. Sometimes, nothing else will do—the plural distinction must be made, and “y’all” is the only good option. So if you hear me say it or see me write it, that’s why. It’s not because I am culturally appropriatin’ Southern culture, y’all.1
Frankly, I also wish we had a viable gender-neutral pronoun. Not something that the left invents to use as a political weapon—just something that would make it so that one does not feel compelled to say “he or she” all the time, or engage in painful contortions to avoid the use of any pronoun in the chosen sentence. (In a less polarized political atmosphere, I bet we could come up with something and have it catch on organically. But a less polarized atmosphere seems a long way off right now.)
#3 One Robber or Many?
Speaking of politics…
I think I must join with C.S. Lewis’ sentiment that, “It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated.”
What we have today is far more than just busybodies. Everyone has a say over everyone else’s life. Add them all up—the bureaucrats, CEOs, elected officials, lobbyists, interest groups, and of course every other voter in the country—and you get a multitude of opinions, interests—none of which are your own, but all of which have power over you. Collectively, on many issues, they have more of a say over your life than you do. Does that sound like any reasonable definition of “consent of the governed”?
Personally, I would feel safer with a tyranny fixed on one man than a tyranny that turns the entire population into my oppressors.
How about you?
It does have to be noted that there has been some y’all inflation in the South. Sometimes, “y’all” is used in the singular, forcing southerners to use “all y’all” as the plural. Oh well.
#1, agreed, wasting food is unacceptable
#2, I say ya'll all the time, but being from the NE, didn't pick it up until I got into country music and it stuck.
#3, if I had to choose, most certainly one is preferable to the borg
Good stuff. French was my worst subject in high school, but I remember that 'vous' is 2nd person plural but much more polite and respectful even when talking to a single person who is not a close friend, mate, or confidant. 'Tu' is used as singular 2nd person for spouse, colleague, friend, etc. One exception: one never uses 'vous' when talking to a pet or other animal. That would just be silly.
Pretty sensible, I'd say. They use 'vous' in much the way Southerners use 'y'all' with a person they don't know closely. Southerners do use all y'all with group, and the French use "vous tous" as the equivalent of 'all y'all'. It transliterates to "you all", so there's a lot of parallelism between French and southern English in this one area.
A gender-neutral pronoun in English would be useful. 'One' is the closest we have, I guess, but it doesn't quite do the job. I was taught to use 'he or she' or 'his or hers' optionaly just once in an essay and then use 'he' and 'his' thereafter for brevity. Masculine forms were to be the default. Context was supposed to cover the rest ... it worked for me, but for others, it became a political cause and a 'raison d'etre'.