Overthinking bananas, define healthy

I have a tendency to overthink things and confuse myself.

This is one of those posts. Consider this warning.

 

Define healthy.  Easy enough…  change it for “good for you”. 

But good how?

 

I’ve been thinking about this. And I think I’m a bit confused from the different camps operating on different definitions. 

It seems like some foods considered highly healthy by some, are considered very low by others.

The groups… as best as I see them.

1. Calories.
2. Nutrient value.
3. Natural.
4. Traditional.
5. Intended to be eaten.
6. Obvious

So now let me explain those.

1. Calories/weight loss
Simple enough, lowest calories is the healthiest food. Works great for weight loss. Pitfalls to me: It makes the diet code red mountain dew, essentially designed to be so foreign to the body that it can’t figure out what to do with it and so has no calories, healthier than a glass of milk that every other category is going to choose as the healthier option. And just because the tea makes you lose weight by peeing a lot, does not mean it is a healthy thing to be doing.

2. Nutrient value.
Items with the highest amounts of nutrients is the most healthy. Seems logical.
Pitfalls to me: The questionable benefit of adding vitamins to everything down to even bottled water, sometimes lack of balance as to which nutrients are focused on. Fiber diets, diets claiming miracle foods or berries.

3. Natural/simple
The less processed, the better. Organic is tops. 
Pitfalls to me: Whole milk vs skim, Bacon vs turkey bacon, Butter vs its many substitutes (I can’t believe its not butter spray). Animal fat period really.

4. Traditional
If it isn’t something your great-grandmother would recognize as food, don’t eat it. (I assume this phrase was aimed at people older than me… as mine would have recognized both a twinkie and cocoapuffs.) This one seems like it gets in with the natural a lot, and I hear it a lot from the ones who are aiming at being self-sufficient.
Pitfalls to me: It’s a nice thought… in some cases. But most of those cases would be covered under the simple and natural category. I’m thinking the fried chicken, gravy, and cakes she would recognize probably keep this from being a useful overall rule for me.

5. Intended to be eaten.
Raw foodists. Ok, this one may need a bit more explanation for most.  There are groups of people who believe that we were designed to be frugivores… that is, eating raw fruits, seeds (grain) and nuts as our primary diet. (In this case, fruit gets defined as anything the plant makes for reproducing itself and is not the plant itself. So cucumbers, squash, etc are fruits… and so are potatoes.) Depending on which group you look at, this is either laid out biblically (hallelujah acres, etc), or scientifically or both.
Science-wise, we don’t have the tooth style, or extra stomachs etc like the animals meant to eat the greenery itself… nor are our taste buds programmed to reward those foods like they do the sweetness of fruits. We also lack the tooth style of the primarily carnivores and the short intestine length to prevent meat remnants from going putrid before they are out of our system. But we match pretty well the primates, who eat mostly fruit. And the fruit seems balanced best to match our needs, and appeals to our natural tastes and visual appeal.
Biblically, this is explained as that adam was designed for garden life, eating fruits (um… except that one tree), and while we were blessed with being designed with flexibility to survive outside the garden without mature plant life… but that should be the backup, and when fruit available, it should be what we eat.
(Ok… so both camps probably would wince at that explanation… but that’s a simplified summary anyway).
Pitfalls to me: Appeal and practicality. Ok fine, even agreeing with the argument at face value that we were meant to, doesn’t to me mean that we should be currently. And given how many other references to eating kosher things and bread and the like are mentioned, I’m guessing even if he originally intended one thing, it seems like he’s ok on the change. Though I have had some close friends at one point in my life who followed this in belief if not always in practice… and I had read quite a bit about it. which I think sometimes unintentionally gives the fruits higher weight in my mind than just tasting sweeter.

6. Obvious
Ok, from the hardest to the easiest… it just seems healthy. We know somehow what is and isn’t.
Pitfalls: Lack of supportive reasoning rarely helps. Things like values of our parents and society may teach us things we assume to be instinct, but may just as easily be wrong. Granola. That mcdonalds salad that has more fat and calories than the larger hamburger.

 

 So about this banana with natural peanut butter on it.

It seems healthy. It’s a fruit, its natural, my ancestors would know it, and it has nutrients.

It also has the same amount of calories as two twinkies.

Is it healthy? Probably.

But it only takes 5 of them to make up the recommended daily calorie intake of an adult female… and only 4 to make it to the recommended dieting calorie intake for the day. 

So if it adds to weight problems more than eating a single twinkie instead, is the impact on health really worse? Or do the other factors making it more healthy trump the calorie impact still?

Should I be eating it?

 

And now that we’ve battled the issues over bananas, lets talk about homemade yogurt vs processed light yogurt. One has much more fat and more calories. The other has less calories by adding in stuff the body can’t process, as well as the preservatives and the like. Does the naturalness offset the other?

And how about iceberg lettuce? Nothing to speak of at all for nutrition, but also nothing to speak of for calories. Does the free ride on calories and naturalness justify the lack of nutrient benefit?

Does the non-natural state of seedless grapes change anything?

Has anyone ever won the fight on whether or not an egg is good for you?

 

Its thought trains like this that really truly make me believe that ignorance really can be bliss. It can shut up, eat the stupid salad, eat the banana in moderation, and not give it a second thought.

Goodbye Sarah, and her syndrome, and facebook

I suppose this story starts best in junior high. 7th grade more specifically.

Our local Christian radio show broadcasted a nationwide call in talk show for teens on Sunday nights. One Sunday I got through, and got to talk to a certain musician… made a dork of myself, and that’s how Sarah noticed me.

Because they gave hometowns and first names. And I lived in a really small town. So it was fairly obvious. Which mostly just caused teasing and annoyance from those who had heard me make a dork of myself.

 

Sarah however thought it was cool… and started talking to me, where we had never really had any sort of connection or reason to pay attention to each other previously.

Nobody in my normal circle of friends was a Christian at this point. Nobody in the Christian circle in my school wanted much to do with me. Nobody in the church I went to had any interest in Christian music. Sarah was really into Christian music, but wasn’t in any of the bible studies or Christian groups as the school, so at the time I hadn’t even realized that she was a Christian.

But… we clicked. We spent hours and hours on the phone… talked to each other almost every night. We had different interests in bands, but still knew each other’s music interests when nobody else seemed to know what either of us were talking about, and wasn’t tired of hearing about them. She was friends with one of the staff at the radio station, and I was friends with another (or he was tolerant and bored enough to put up with me.)

With my best friend having decided the year before to live with her dad across the country (with good reasons), Sarah stepped in pretty easily as the one I connected to the most for the remaining half of the school year, and through 8th and 9th grade, and off and on for the next year attending different high schools.

 

But only on the phone. 

I didn’t notice this at first. It seriously took me probably a good year to notice. We didn’t have many classes together, she lived in town while I lived a few miles outside of it, so it didn’t really set off any notice at first.

Her sister was a year or two younger, and had never seemed to like me talking to Sarah on the phone at all, which I assumed to just be a sibling thing… so I didn’t think a whole lot about the fact that even though we were both going to the same concerts, we never went together or even spoke to each other at them, because she had her sister with her.

 

But I still remember the day that I noticed.

I don’t even remember what was so important, but there was something I wanted to tell her about that related to the previous night’s conversation. And I knew that her first period class was near where mine was, and managed to catch her in the hall between homeroom and my class. She was standing with some other kids when I came up and told her.

And she pretended she didn’t know what I was talking about… brushed me off, then left the group to almost run to her class.

 

I was stunned. I mean, I knew I was far from popular, and didn’t really care for the most part. I was a nerd, the librarians loved me, teachers liked me and bent rules to let me mess around with computers and such I wasn’t technically supposed to… I was the overweight girl who had no real shot at being popular and didn’t care to try to be.

But Sarah wasn’t a nerd, though she was a bit overweight. She did worry about things like makeup and clothes, and hung out on weekends at the mall with her sister.

But in all the hours of conversations, the differences had never once become an issue.

 

However that night, the topic I had mentioned to her in the hall was the start of the conversation on the phone, which went on as if nothing had happened for its usual hours of chatting.

And it always did. The hall incident never once came up.

With all the issues I had with family relationships and the small cluster of people who were my friends, I never said a word about it. I valued the connection over the phone to much to risk injuring it, especially now that I realized it was threatened.

I sometimes smiled or whatnot when we passed in the halls, but I let her be. I didn’t bother her when other people were around, or even talk to her… as now I realized that even before that time I’d been missing cues that she wanted to cut hall conversations short previously.

The next year, we had a class together, and she did actually sit near me… the next row over and a couple places behind, close enough she could communicate with me if she wanted to beforehand, or ignore me as she chose.

 

The one time we ever hung out together in person was the summer after our sophomore years at different schools. Our conversations had lessened in frequency a bit during the year, but were still several nights a week. But we were both bored, and I was going on a bike ride, and she decided she wanted to come along. (We both moved to the bigger city in the meantime, not far apart, but hadn’t seen each other in person in over a year). So I rode the few miles to a spot near her house where she met me.

She almost immediately suggested we go to the house of the dj I knew. I knew where he lived, but had never gone there, or even thought about it really. But it was only about a mile away, so we went. And he was decent enough to the two random teens showing up at his door unexpectedly… invited us in for a few minutes to chat.

Afterwards, Sarah was no longer interested in the bike ride, after having ridden only the one mile to get there. Or in hanging out to do anything else.

She’d mentioned before she’d thought he was cute… but thinking about it that evening I began to wonder if there was more crush to it than I thought. And maybe less to our friendship.

Gradually the calls phased mostly out, then she found out she was moving to another state. She never returned my letters to her new address.

————————————————————————-

 

In working through other issues, Sarah has come up a few times. Mostly as evidence of the prior issues showing themselves in my response and acceptance of the situation, normally not even being a big mention.

But the more life goes on, the more I start seeing damage from the situation itself. Obviously the self esteem takes a hit… but the trust is actually the one I run into more frequently.

How much do I trust that my friends really are my friends? That they don’t just put up with me to my face and roll their eyes at me behind my back? More than one boyfriend has taken heat over a suspected Sarah syndrome that probably was entirely in my head… and I find that suspicion creeping in as a rather frequent tactic to push myself away from otherwise seemingly stable friendships.

 

Fighting it with logic usually fails. Logic will find some tiny little frustration they have with me and base a whole mountain over that molehill. 

Mostly its something I just have to catch, and to make a deliberate decision to ignore. Because I know that it isn’t normal relationship flow, isn’t logical, and isn’t likely.

And because, when it comes down to it, I have considered it, and I’d much rather be naive and be taken for a fool than to over-react to every small indication that I’m being one. Not that I want to be taken for a fool… but the consequences of being a fool a few times that could have been prevented are less than the consequences of pushing everyone away in the name of avoiding pain that might come from those few cases.

But it’s still much easier said than lived sometimes.

 

 

One of my favorite CS Lewis books, that I really didn’t expect to like all that much, is called The Four Loves. I have found myself understanding more about relationships of all sorts through that book than I ever would have imagined.

And one of the things that I got from there was the idea of friendship as being based on a common interest shared by a subset of a group. Golfers at a workplace for example. And the friendship level of things relying on that shared interest as the friends are together focused at that interest itself rather than at each other. (VERY loose paraphrasing..)

A lot of my drifting friendships have so much more easily been accepted and explained by that… as either the shared interest is lost, or the shared group to be a subset off of is no longer shared.

But I think Sarah is probably the one where it helped the most to have an explanation.

I’ve chosen to believe that she was actually my friend, and did actually care. Partially on evidence of other areas of trust such as telling me about cutting (something I’d not understand for many more years)… partially on understanding of pressures to fit in and wanting to be in the popular crowd… and partially just on the fact that it makes me feel better to do so.

—————————————————

 

I was on facebook the other day when I noticed one of my friends was friends with one of Sarah’s old friends. I clicked through to his list, and saw she was on it.

I clicked through to view her list, and saw a lot of her old popular friends, and old crushes. The guy she actually prayed about that he’d get divorced, and I found myself wondering years later when I later heard that he had. Bands she had been obsessed with back then. That dj we visited, who has gone after his dreams and made it big, gone national in what he wanted to do, and who I wonder a bit whether he’d think we were his first fan club or his first stalkers.

I flipped over to my family-related account, which gives my name, and sent an add request for her. (Against my better judgement.) Which she accepted the next day.

I flipped through her page. She’s married, no kids. Lives in completely different part of the country. Sister and sister’s kid are still in almost all of her pics.

I tried to compose a message to her about ten different times, and failed. I’m not really sure what to say. 

 

Then this afternoon, I was adding some people, and decided to make lists to sort out who was who. And as I made the school friends list, I noticed. She was gone.

Even all these years later, it still made me want to cry a bit. Even after the rounds of healing that have taken place since then, it still made me feel lonely and rejected.

I looked for answers. I flipped over to my main page… what had I done in the last few days that might have made her annoyed? I’d only changed my status twice… I’d uploaded some kid pics I had on my other account but not this one, maybe she’s sensitive about the fact she doesn’t have kids? One of them was kiddo with MWS backstage pass on, maybe she thinks I’m an obsessed freak? 

The last one brought me back a bit. As much of an obsessed freak as she was with one particular band when younger, no stone throwing room there even if she did think so. Maybe she’s still overly pressured by her sister and overly concerned with what other people think of who she associates with. 

Or of course, maybe she really never did care in the first place and was all about the fact that I would listen and had a few radio connections.

Or maybe she didn’t know what to say any more than I did.

 

I’ve thought about sending her messages all evening. 

“Ok, I guess that answers my question of what you really felt” is the one that’s been the most tempting.

But I know that’s not anything that would ever lead to anything good coming from it.

 

But it’s still really bugging me.

 

And I can’t tell if its just soreness from the old wounds being poked at again, or if it’s something I should pursue further in the name of healing and closure. For either of us for that matter.

It was so much easier way back then to just write her off as a social wimp pressured by a quest for acceptance and approval and feel sorry for her.

Negativity balance

I find myself not wanting to post much…

not for lack of topics, or the more usual lack of time.

but because I feel like I’m being whiny and negative so much on here. 

 

i know part of that’s just kinda life right now. things are the most rosy. 

and part of it is probably the bias of the medium. writing ends up being things that don’t get verbalized much in conversations and in-person interactions.. or things i’m trying to deal with… and so ends up being the negative stuff that doesn’t get dumped elsewhere in real life.

 

but i guess it bugs me a bit that it bugs me. if that makes any sense.

i don’t want to just post positive fluff and such intentionally for the sole purpose of making things more cheerful.

but the process of posting yet another round of grumpiness leaves a bit to be desired on inspiring posting initiative.

Asking specific

p 85

By pinpointing what you want from the Holy Spirit, you are more likely to get it and recognize it for what it is when it actually comes.

 

This struck me as interesting… and not even really in terms of creativity. 

And in thinking about it, I realize I’m really bad about this most of the time. Especially in things address directly to the spirit, I tend to be really really vague.

“Lead me” I say. Lead me where?

• “in a straight path” from ps 27:11, 
• “ to the rock that is higher than I.” from ps 61:2, 
• “in the way everlasting” ps 139:24
• “on level ground.” ps 143:10
• “down to this raiding party” from 1 sam 30:15? (actually, that does sound fun out of context)
• etc etc etc

Ok, so I usually mean “in the way I should go”… but still… it’s really massively openly vague.

Maybe if I ask more specifically, it will be more apparent when I’m getting a specific answer to that specific question, where when i’m asking vague, i’m not really even sure where to be looking for my answering to be.

lead me to the right job could be anything… where give me guidance on whether or not think specific job is the right one focuses thing down to looking for pointing towards or pointing against. much easier to look at the trees and forget the giant overwhelming forest.

 

But I think I’m a bit scared of being pushy.

With formerly attending a church that seemed to me to run straight off the deep end of prosperity gospel more and more each week and lots of hype and experiences over substance… I think I’m a little skittish about stepping on “toes” by getting myself too close to that sort of “you said i can have whatever i want, so i say its mine, do it now” sort of mentality.

Or of overly limiting with what I know is my very limited perception. if i’m concentrating on this specific possibility, then this one, then that one, am i completely and totally missing this thing he’s trying to do way off over here?

but then… that’s why he can answer “no”. 

and then hopefully clue me in a bit better to where the yes’s are… lest this become a process of elimination…. or reason start quoting proverb 16:33 and grabbing dice and coins lol

 

something interesting to think on anyways.

The left turn has never existed.

Once upon a time, I made a list of the biggest wrong decisions I’ve made in my life. 

It was long. 

It ran from career decisions, to school decisions, to a few billion relationship and friendship decisions, to just random life decisions.

I messed around with it a bit… narrowed it down to some of the more critical ones… labeled them… figured out that I was roughly on plan xyz by now, plans a and b and every other single letter label being long forgotten memories.

I can’t even remember now exactly what my point was in making the list.

 

It was some time later when I was thinking back with loneliness and regret over a past relationship, and the time gone by. I found myself realizing that had things gone according to the original plans, we’d have been married for so many years already. And wondering of the kids we would have had. And where we would have been by now.

And then it goes, as it often does, into the guilt and what ifs. The realization in hindsight that the major issues came unraveled about a year after the end… and would have been long gone by now had we only made it work a bit longer. If only I had done this. If only I hadn’t done that. 

Then I get even harder on myself, and wonder what would have happened by now in the ministry involved. How many more people might have been helped if only I’d made better choices. How many people might be in problems now that might have been helped if things hadn’t fallen apart. 

How many people might have been cured of cancer as a result of the brilliant doctor that was never born because we gave up too soon? 

 

The logic in me knows that this isn’t being realistic, it isn’t being fair, it isn’t even being helpful. And yet, the emotional side still mourns over the losses, and wallows in sorrow over things that never could have been predicted from where I stood at the time decisions were made. Beating myself up may not be productive, but at least it feels like appropriate punishment to somehow try to prevent future occurrences.

But it was during one of these times… about the time I was asking forgiveness for the dead orphans who never got a home (of course completely because of my failure on something only very very distantly related), that I got a nudge.

“The orphans never existed” it said. 

 

This was weird. Of course orphans existed. Millions of them exist all over the place. Lots of them die. And of course maybe had I made certain decisions something might have somehow been related to helping a few. And so I tried to argue.

But still was the clear nudge…. they never existed.

This actually took me a bit to really get it. 

Embarrassingly long actually. And I’m still not sure how well I can really explain it. 

 

But really… they never exist. They never would have existed.

Neither do the supposed children that would have been born. The people who would be helped. Even the husband that would have been. The jobs that would have been. They only exist in my own imagination.

The entire path and life had I followed that path? None of it would have ever existed in any form.

 

Part of this is simply because it’s just dreaming. Reality never matches up to plans and hopes. 

But I realized… it goes a lot deeper than that.

 

I have a God that knows all, and I have a loving God. 

He knew what choices I would face, and he knew the choices I would make, long before I even had the capacity to know what a choice even was.

 

When I looked on from the point of decision, I saw two (or more) paths… and sometimes a short ways ahead on each. 

I’ve seen the road I took, and all it held, so its tempting to think back and wonder what I missed on the other path. 

But the other path wasn’t there. At all. Even the short bit I thought I saw was an illusion.

Why? Because it was already known that I wasn’t going to take that choice, even if it was the better road to take. 

Why would there be plans depending on something it was already known I would never do? Why would God have orphans dependent on something that He knew was never going to come through for them? Why would he have the lives of people waiting particularly on a help that he knew would get off track and never make it to them? 

 

I do believe there are certain things in life that are planned out for certain people to accomplish. But I don’t think I’ve been as good at realizing that things that were not to be, would have never been anyway.

It doesn’t make my bad choices any less bad. I wish that I would have taken lots of the other paths…. that those paths would have existed rather than my actual path.

 

But it helps greatly to realize that this is plan a. Always was, and still is. It’s not the greatest plan, and its far from the easiest plan… but it’s where I am, and where He knew I would be, and its where the future roads will come from.

Why would he have put them on an imaginary road He knew I would never take?

When it leads me through the desert, even if its a surprise and disappointment to me, it was already known and planned into the scheme of things long before I ever got to the turn. The things I’m supposed to do and the things I’m supposed to see and the people I’m supposed to meet and the dreams I’m supposed to fulfill were all planted in their places knowing where I would be. 

 

It’s easy to grieve over the things I imagine were lost on the untaken path… especially when feeling a bit lost on the current path. But I grieve over shadows and mirages, figments of my imagination and guilt.

The reality that does exist, and will exist, is waiting for me to get over it.

The way the office REALLY runs…

So we’re talking on the way home tonight… and it becomes clear kiddo thought palin (aka “the girl”) was a third candidate.

So I’m trying to explain what a vice president is… while trying to drive in heavy traffic. So I can’t say my explanation was great…. or for that matter even remember what it was.

So kiddo gets to “so there’s two bosses?”

“Sort of… but one’s the main boss. Does your school have a vice-principal?”
All of my schools did, but she goes to a magnet school that only has 50 kids per grade… so while I’ve met the principal, I really had no idea if they even had a vice principal. And honestly had never even noticed the lack of one before.

“we have two girls who run the school.” 
her principal is female…

“oh… so your vice principal is a girl too?”

“their names are miss whatever and miss whatever…”
neither one was the principal’s name 

“those are the principals?”

“they are the bosses. they sit in the office, and they call kids down, and they…” 
she continues with a list of all the things they do for probably 15 more items…

“oh…. those are the secretaries.”

“they run the school.”

 

yes…. yes they do really.

but now how do you explain to a 6 year old why the person who runs everything in the school isn’t technically the boss? or what a boss really does if someone else is the one running everything? 

amazing how different our impressions of leadership are. when does the leader change from doing the major things, to being the one who doesn’t do them but decides things about them?

I will not buy cereal. I will not buy cereal. I will not…

We don’t eat a lot of cereal around here. 

It’s not because we don’t like it…. we just don’t eat breakfast here. 

Kiddo eats at the daycare center 5 mornings a week…. fresh, wonderful stuff from their kitchen and cooks on site, not just a school-type breakfast. Freshly baked homemade cinnamon rolls included in price already vs cold bowl of cereal just isn’t even a battle. 

Sat she eats after I drop her off at my aunts house, because we have to leave earlier to drive her across town and she’s never fully awake really before we leave…. and sunday she’s usually down at my mom’s house until we leave for church (late service doesn’t start until 11:15), so she ends up eating down there. 

Me, well, I probably should eat breakfast. And when I’m thinking about it I will eat a thing of yogurt in the morning not because I want it but because I know I should. But for years, I ran on a second shift schedule… at work, as much as I could manage at college, and about every summer during high school. It’s just my normal rhythm… I don’t wake up until the crack of noon whether or not I’m physically out of my bed and moving. Food has very little appeal to me in the morning.

 

But we do like cereal. And I do buy probably 4 or 5 boxes a year that get eaten as snacks and as alternative dinners for an extremely picky eater. 

And, as much as I know it’s not a healthy choice, probably all 5 of those boxes are either booberry or frankenberry. As I said, kiddo is a picky eater… but I have to admit it’s one of my favorites too, because it tastes good. The flavor is stronger than most of the other fruity things like fruit loops… and it’s kinda nice to have the entire bowl the same flavor. I don’t like the whole fruitbasket at once. And it makes awesome snacks both dry and using the rice krispie treats recipe. 

 

Fortunately, walmart here carries both of them all year round. So we can get random boxes of it as desired. 

The main grocery store chain here does not. It only has them during the halloween season, but has them cheaper when they do have them… I’ve never figured out exactly why. 

 

I was not planning on getting cereal this morning… I was getting sandwich stuff. But then I saw the pile. 

Seasonal cereal…. means seasonal item markdowns to get it out of the store so Christmas stuff can continue it’s expansion without it in the way. 

This means boxes of cereal for a buck! Yay!

 

I bought 6.

I brought them home, and started looking around for general mills cereal coupons… knowing they almost always have some, and could probably whack about half of the price off for another trip. 

 

And then sanity hit. 

Yes, it’s cheap cereal. 

Yes, it’s not only cheap cereal, its our favorite type. 

And yes, due to the seasonal nature, it’s fresh enough it has expiration dates almost a year away. 

But. but but but. 

 

We don’t need more than 6 boxes of cereal at one time. We just don’t. Especially not when I’m trying to get things thinned down for moving. 

We don’t eat that much, and yes if it were around we would probably eat more of it, but then, I’m not sure that’s a very good thing either. 

There will be later coupons… making for good deals later. Maybe not the 50 cents a box I could probably pull right now, but still good prices. 

 

And yet…. the lure…. is still driving me nuts. I want to go stockpile in the name of pantry… I want to blame uncertainty in the shaky economy…

Logic vs emotion again. 

Right now logic seems to be holding stable. I will not go buy cereal. 

But ya know…. maybe my mom could use about 6 boxes…. and my aunt…. and… and… and I could buy every box I could get my hands on and donate it to the food drive this winter… 

But, with the medical expenses last month, and car tag fees this month… logic and the bank account say I probably shouldn’t do that either.

Sympathy and responsibility

I’m finding myself lacking in sympathy lately.

Here’s the deal. I have a brother and a half brother that both work for the same company… aircraft manufacturing. 

This industry is known to be fickle. Always. Both of them have been previously laid off from other local aircraft companies… strikes happen every few years…. a few years ago even my stepdad was laid off from this exact same company where he had previously worked for around 2 decades. 

So both of these brothers knew going into this job that it was fickle. 

Why did they work there anyway? Because the industry has by far the best paying jobs in town. I wanna say the younger one started at something to the effect of 17 an hour.

 

Boeing strike. Not their company…. but their company sells its products to them. So they get cut down to 3 days a week on hours, and are told that even though the strike is over, it will stay that way until the end of the year while things get caught back up. 

Yes, it sucks. 

But… really? They knew strikes happen. They knew layoffs happen. They chose to work there anyway for the higher pay they have been enjoying. Both have bought houses in the past two years, and both have newer cars. 

 

And I do respect my younger brother. He does what he needs to do… his house was a reasonable choice, in a reasonable neighborhood, at a reasonable price… and he has taken on a second job to make payments work while the days have been cut and he has two days a week free. 

 

But when my mother starts this whole poor boys sympathy streak…. I’m just really not feeling it. And when she starts in on the older brother, even less so. 

Yes, they have 4 kids. However, he is the one who has the house where we all went “how in the world did they qualify for that?”. Mom starts in with the sympathy on how expensive it is to drive all that far out there to their affluent suburb… and how expensive to heat a 4 level house where all 4 kids have their own rooms (plus a large play room). And how his take home pay is cut even more from the garnishment from a car he had repossessed a few years ago (about the 4th car he’s had repo’ed if you count the one my mom took over as hers when he was in trouble while still living at home).

The thing is, they have been getting help from mom since way before the strike. And before they even got the house for that matter. He hasn’t done anything during the strike to help himself. She works a couple of days a week as a waitress, but even that is a recent thing. 

Yes, he is in trouble. Yes, he may lose the house and the cars. But… well…. he knew better. He’s been through the car thing before, and the job thing before. He took his risks, and it worked for a while. But to paint him as the poor unfortunate victim of the whole big bad economic collapse is really just giving him an excuse for not having made the responsible choices when he had the choice to make.

And what will he have to do? To have an older car…. like the rest of us. To live in a moderately sized rental home… like the rest of us. Is this really such an awful fate to pity him for? For the loss of overly costly items for the same practical choices he could have made in the first place and been better off?

To hear my mother go on, you’d think this fate would be the ultimate tragedy. I find myself wondering if she has completely forgotten some of the crappy places she has lived, and i have lived, and crappy cars we’ve driven, and the fact that we made it work and we survived and moved on. I don’t think the older brother has owned a crappy car in his life. Most of the places he has lived have had rent about double the highest my mother or I have ever paid. It’s not like his choices were made with the only available option he had in the situation and he’s still failing… he’s failing because he made choices that were more luxurious than the ones he could survive with.

I will be sad for the younger brother, who is actually trying, and does actually have a grip on reality, should he lose in the end. But I don’t think he will. I think he knows he may have some choices to make as far as cars and such in the near future if things don’t improve, and I think he will make them if he has to. He will recover.

But really…. I’m just not feeling the sympathy for the poor victims of their own risk-taking earlier choices, made knowing the possibility of the future holding what it has held. I know I probably should… but it just isn’t there. Yes, circumstances suck. Yes, other factors came into play.

But what ever happened to a concept of responsibility for risks knowingly taken?

Growing up to different songs

My daughter has a thing for ice cream trucks. 

What am I saying? Every kid seems to have a radar on those things. 

However, my kiddo has an over-indulgent grandma who lives two doors down who supplies cash for what seems like unending ice cream truck purchases. So literally, the lady knows her name and sits and chats with her daily… and slows down to almost a stop and looks for her when my car is here but the kid isn’t at the curb of one of the two houses. 

 

But that’s her favorite ice cream lady. We live in a semi-large city, in an almost entirely residential neighborhood, near a junior high… which means we have at least 2 but normally 3 ice cream trucks go by on any given day that it’s abobe 60 degrees, even if its an odd warm spell in February or if it’s raining. And sometimes even a mexican food truck. It’s really very odd… but you kinda get used to it after a while. They come for the same reason the guys go door to door here selling meat and frozen goods… it’s a concentrated audience.

So of these 3 regular ice cream trucks, the truck driven by her favorite plays the song turkey in the straw. My mom’s favorite plays la cucaracha (sp?) and sells an entirely different type of popsicle from the others that are all fruit flavored and have chunks of fruit in them.

The third one usually comes early enough in the day that she is still at daycare, so she doesn’t hear it much. But she was home the other day when it came by, and made a comment about that being the truck playing the wrong song. 

 

This really struck me as interesting… because when I was a kid, there was only one truck that came by our area, and only when school was out… and that was the song it played. It was the song I grew up associating with ice cream truck. (I have no clue what the name of it is.)

I even remember the first time I heard a truck playing a different song… the one by my grandma’s house played the entertainer (actually, it still does), and it was totally weird to me.

Just as this one is now weird to her. 

 

It made me reflect a bit… about the things that are part of my past that won’t be part of hers.

School districts that will never be anything but an opposing sports team.

Cars my parents owned that will never be anything but another car on the road or a story her mom tells her about her grandparents. 

Restaurants that will have no deep loyalty associated with memories more than the food.

Churches, for that matter denominations, that will never be “hers” unless she chooses them herself someday, but never be her childhood home.

 

And it made me think about the loyalties we have built and are currently building.

About how a different suburb will be the one she remembers living in before moving into town.

About how she will have associations with our vineyard church songs similar to the ones I hold about some baptist hymns.

How red, navy and white will be the combination that instantly triggers school colors thoughts rather than my royal blue and white for one and red and white for another, and eagles instead of lions or titans. 

 

And it really made me pause a bit, and wonder if some of them are things I want her to have. 

Do I want that awful but really cheap pizza place we visit to be what she remembers as special, when I was making it as a quick solution to too frequent time crunches? 

Do I want those packaged cookies to be what she associates with childhood and makes a comfort food?

Do I want that halloween costume to be what she remembers sentimentally that she wore in first grade?

 

The song I grew up to is not the song she will, and is a song she will only even hear softly as a distant sound through me. 

But I think sometimes I need to stop and remember that the song she will hear is the song that’s currently playing. And to remember that I’m frequently the one choosing it, and put a bit more focus sometimes into the decisions that form it.

The difference of reality

I happened across an article about the selection of a new kumari the other day. And as it tends to do, one page lead to another to another…. and I spent a bit reading various things about these young girls worshiped as a goddess, but only until they reach puberty and turn “mortal” again. 

 

I found myself wondering what the girl thinks. Especially when she’s nearing the end of her time as goddess. 

Does she believe she is human? Have the years of people treating her as sacred gone to her head enough to allow her to really believe she is a goddess and not just a random kid? And how sad it must be if she really does, only to have it torn away through no fault of her own. And we think regular teens have self acceptance issues.

 

Or does she wonder… go on with the act for fear of the massive rejection should she fail to play the part, but deep inside feel like she isn’t all they think she is? Does she wonder what her worshipers would think if they really knew what went on inside of her?

 

In a way, its a game we all play. We (usually) can’t make people think we are gods… but we like to think that we can at least make them think we have it all together. Like we’re happy, everything is fine, the house is always perfect, children are always well behaved, nothing ever goes wrong. 

Are we scared of what would happen if they realized we were just a kid?

 

And I have to wonder a bit, if that girl might be much happier not being a goddess. Just being with her family, being herself, and being a kid instead. In spite of all of the worship and attention and perks she would lose. Would it all really be worth it when it all came down to it?

Is the approval really worth all the masks we wear and the effort we use to try to keep them from slipping? 

 

And maybe we’d find… beyond the first line of people who may believe otherwise… that there’s a huge entire world of people who realize we’re just a kid with a costume, not a goddess, and are perfectly ok with us being exactly that.