beulahbondo's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Draw a fish and give it a name I don't have the itch to post much anymore, perhaps because my Scrabulous addiction is much stronger. Also, I changed the template because this entry is so long... Thanksgiving and family, however, always provide a reason to write. This past one was irritating. My brother's in-laws have a very powerful presence and I just have to accept that I am but a leaf in their current. I brought a vegetarian shepherd's pie to the dinner and no one even tried it. No one even passed it around. Come on, people! It was at least in the same brown color scheme as everything else on the table. I know you all have your traditions (we do too) but you could acknowledge the presence of the alien food and ask what it is or something. Then the older little nephew, who is now almost six, started in on me about why I don't eat meat. I gave him the standard answer that I give children: I don't like to eat meat because I don't like the way it tastes. So Curly, in his nerdly way, starts explaining at length that not all meat tastes the same: that turkey and chicken kind of taste the same, but pigs and cows taste different. Then something about how farmers clean off "muddy pigs" -- I don't know, his speech delays are still pretty strong and I can understand about 70% of what he says. Anyway, he was so into this, and I thought, okay, let's see what he does with this concept, and I whispered to him, "Also, I don't like eating things that used to be alive but now they're dead." And he smiled hugely and passed this on to his mother, who gave me an evil, not-friendly smile, and said, "Well, Curly, ask Aunt Beulah why she eats fish." I said, "Fish don't have the personality or intelligence of farm animals." Which is not really the point, but I was flustered and upset and it's hard to address both a five-year-old and an adult at the same time, when they have different agendas. And I said to sister-in-law, "Please don't question my beliefs." She said, "I'm not! Curly is asking you. And you brought it up. It's too confusing for a child, anyway." SO WHY IS SHE MAKING IT MORE CONFUSING? So Curly is getting more and more excited, and fills his cheeks up with milk, and spits it like a fountain at his grandmother. Which pretty much brings conversation at that end of the table to a halt, so I turn my attention to the other end, where sister-in-law's father is in the middle of a long exegisis of his youngest son's mortgage problems (which admittedly are pretty bad). Fun! When it all wrapped up, I went and watched "Ratatouille" with Curly, and we did not discuss whether a rat would eat meat. Later that night, when everyone else was in bed, sister-in-law, her friend, and I were talking, or rather they were, about marriage and divorce. "Curly's Father is pretty damn lucky to have me," sister-in-law said. I thought she was joking, in that "oh my hubby" way, but she continued to list how each of her siblings or their spouses was lucky to have the other for one reason or another, in terms of making up for certain personality deficiencies. Whatever. Probably true. But she said nothing at all about her youngest brother, the one with mortgage problems, the one who is adopted and is a person of color, married to a person of color, living on the opposite coast in lower-middle-class food stampy troubledom peopled with bad mortgages, Jehovah's Witnesses, children taken in from the wife's drug-addicted siblings, etc. etc. I guess in their otherness, luck does not enter the picture. Eh, whatever, this is not much of a reentry into Diaryland. But really, could I please just have one vegetarian, non-married relative? 10:56 a.m. - 2007-11-24 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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