Girl Anachronicles

... arroz y habichuelas ...

Food is always an issue in my household: Eze likes his rice & beans, pork chops and viandas; I don’t. I’m usually met with incredulous faces (complete with gaping mouths and wide eyes) when I admit that I don’t like rice & beans at all. If you’re boricua, you have to like rice & beans, sancocho, pasteles… in a case like mine, the kindest of remarks is that I’m “fussy with food”. I’ve even been told that I wrongfully believe that I’m not boricua (“te crees europea, es?”). I’ve tried by all means to understand why it is that there’s food that everyone seems to love that I don’t like at all: this is important to me becase most of that food is the food my husband loves, the food that is served at his parents’ house table. The easiest conclusion achieved is that I was brought up on an “American menu” (a.k.a. hamburgers, hot dogs, mac & cheese), but that is only partly right. I think I finally understood why it is much more complex than that…

Comfort food

(n) Defined as food that gives emotional comfort to the one eating it, these tend to be favorite foods of childhood, or linked to a person, place or time with which the food has a positive association.

For most people around me, such things as rice & beans, pork chops, bacalao, etc are associated with positive and happy times around the table with the family: the warm and loving mom that cooked this for you is the one handing you the plate with a smile. There’s no trauma to eating a plateful of rice & beans, right?

Well, in my case, I wasn’t so lucky to be born liking rice & beans, and the earliest memory I have of that dish is my Mom snarling at me to eat it all. Beans taste to me like force-feeding. It’s not comforting at all. I’m pretty sure these incidents were not daily occurrences: my mom also cooked mashed potatoes with hot dogs, cordon bleu, etc… these were the foods I associated with good times: sharing a chicken cordon bleu piece with my father … yeah, eating most of it because I didn’t like my own dish …

Comfort food for me? Sweet dinner rolls with butter, with a side of slices of salchichón. Instant mashed potatoes with chopped salchichas mixed in. Serrano ham with fried cheese balls. Arabian desserts. My grandmother’s turkey and relleno (potatoes, eggs, onions, almonds, raisins). Mom’s ground beef with rice. Colombian or Venezuelan arepas. Braunschweiger. It wasn’t so much what food I had most often, it was the food that I came to associate with happiness

Some things, I’ve learned to love as an adult: peppers, roquefort cheese, onions, cauliflowers, some viandas. Others, like rice & beans or string beans (or lima beans, or any kind of beans,except refried – because they’ve been killed and mashed) I associate immediately with frustration and almost being sick at the table …

So, dear loved ones: stop insisting on the rice & beans. It.Makes.Me.Sick. (and eating it certainly feels like a chore)

Thank you.

I just got home from a failed attempt at penetrating the biggest mall in this island (Plaza las Américas, of course, the center of everyyyything). I wanted to get a rare orchid for my mother: it was an dark purple plant with leaves that slightly shimmered as if gold dust had been sprinkled on them, a beauty! But it was an EPIC FAIL, mainly because I couldn’t even get a parking spot.

At 11:30, Plaza las Américas was already bursting with traffic that complied with X-mas-grade expectations. People were “hunting” after more intelligent shoppers that were already done and leaving Hell. It felt like trying to get your own buffalo among a tribe of seasoned huntsmen: intimidating, tiresome, frustrating. I gave up after half an hour, called Mom to let her know she would get her gift a bit later than most, got the distinct flavor of disappointment in the tone of her response… which got me thinking …

If I’ve forsaken St. Valentine’s because – REALLY! – why would I want to celebrate my own relationships at tandem with the rest of the world? … then, why do I subject myself to the imposition of a fucking Hallmark holiday to celebrate my love for my own mother the same freaking day everyone else does? Why do we – the same ones that have successfully unshackled ourselves from the obligatory X-mas, St. Valentine’s, and other miscellaneous fabricated festivities – insist on behaving like brainless sheep only for our own mothers’ sakes? Is our love for our mothers so generic that we agree on celebrating it like most other people do?

And in the case of people like me, people whose mothers insist on celebrating all things Hallmark-Lifetime-Precious Moments: why do we cave in anyways? Why do we agree on giving the goddamned holiday the importance it doesn’t deserve?

It’s a holiday – like most others – in which, at  the best of cases, it creates a conundrum in couples and other composite families as to where to spend the day, and for how much amount of time. In the worst of cases, it creates chaos, destruction and death (yes, a bit exaggerated, but not all that off). I’m starting to think holidays are not the best idea when it comes to spending time with your family. It’s usually a bit of a stressful time, and it’s best to stay away from them all and keep sanity levels all around.

Maybe next year, I’ll let them know well before time that I won’t keep bowing to Evil Hallmark and its cheesy ways.

Totally appropriate Mother's Day card from SomeEcards.com

Semester is ending, and the fact that I haven’t posted here regularly has been nagging me like a tiny fly in the back of my mind. Some would say that school is to blame for the lack of blogging, but in my case, I think it may be Twitter.:-/ Microblogging killed regular blogging. Sad.

I have 2 final exams to contend with: I’m not quite ready for either, and being sick (again!) hasn’t helped much. I’ve missed more classes these past few weeks than I did the rest of the semester. Bad move on my part, but I couldn’t help it. However, I’m confident I’ll be able to pull through and pass both courses with good grades.

Another time-consumer has been Fotutos y Cuchufletes: my latest project – I’d say my first organized and money-making project. It’s been slow on the takeoff, but I’ve received great feedback mostly. On Monday, I’ll be taking the merch out for a spin at an artisan’s faire in the Hospital del Maestro in Hato Rey. We’ll see if that can help me gather up enough funds to pay for the car and the marbete this month.

There’s also the arrival of the cat, Gallifrey. Two weeks and a half ago, a kitten crossed my path, quite literally, to results very similar to Caprica’s. He had his eyes entirely covered with secretions due to conjunctivitis and couldn’t see where he was going, so he ended up crawling up a truck’s tire. He could have died, but instead he burst into my life with his toilet-paper-wasting ways. He’s much better now (conjunctivitis is gone, his respiratory tract infection is still being taken care of, and stomach parasites have been erradicated!), and making our lives more … interesting.

So, summer is arriving and it looks promising, to say the least. Possibilities of a summer job have arised, let’s see if they materialize. If they do, I’ll have the strangest job in my life yet, and it will most probably be fun too. No more details until I know for sure.