mainstream mayhem

This afternoon I had the unfortunate experience of reacquainting myself with mainstream society. While my kids enjoyed The Simpsons On Demand and my husband enjoyed the wireless internet, I decided to peruse some of the magazines that were on the coffee table: National Geographic, TIME, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, a very large brochure from the Harvard Forest and then a woman’s health magazine (the title of which I cannot remember).
I flipped through most of these, but it was this last one that I decided to take an in depth look at and as I was flipping through the articles I was thinking: Do women really want to know these things? Does it really matter how this celebrity likes to spend her time with her 9-month old son? Do women really need more low calorie low fat snack ideas? And what are you supposed to do with the 2/3 of a pear that you are not supposed to eat? And who the hell has the time to count out exactly 18 jelly beans?

And that’s when the real trauma sets in: the answer to all of the above is yes, otherwise these articles would not be printed, repeatedly, in several concurrent publications, and one of the women who would be interested in such things would be my mother. By the age of 8 I was expected to pack my own lunch from home, buying one from school was not an option and my mother did not have enough time in the morning to get ready for work and make a lunch for me, so the task was placed in my hands. However, there were rules to be followed. I was not allowed to take more than 10 potato chips each day. So, naturally, I always took 12 or 13, and when I was feeling really rebellious I’d take 15 chips, but never any more than that, and never two days in one week, because my mother would surely find out my deception and then there'd be hell to pay.

So, naturally, after browsing such articles this afternoon I am still fuming about the insanities of modern society as I sit in my kitchen sipping the last bottle of my irish stout, rather than getting a good night’s sleep like the rest of my family, and I still think that eating 1/3 of any piece of fruit is just fucking ridiculous!