Jul. 14th, 2003 01:02 pm
Relative normalcy
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muckefuckAs I mentioned to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
grunter today (everyone go and cheer him up; he's coming over all mopey again), I dreamt of interviewing Martha Stewart last night. (I blame some supermarket tabloid I saw at the convenient next to monshu's which had a doctored photo of her looking all bloated.)
She was fixing canapés on camera (for that, blame BBC America and the episode of Faking It they broadcast last night) with a friend of mine and I asked her, "What do you consider anal?" She rather dodged the question by mentioning her philosophy major in college and then going off on a tangent about how she almost chose to study law. I ventured, "If you had become a lawyer instead of a stockbroker, things would have ended up much different today, right?" And she didn't kill me! In fact, afterward she whispered to me what good questions they were.
When I think about it in the cold light of day, I realise that those really are the questions I would ask if I had the chance. I believe that most people see their behaviour as basically "normal", even when they acknowledge that it's not something most people in the world do. So what does someone who thinks it "normal" to tie together an hors-d'œuvre with a single chive consider to be anal, obsessive behaviour? I have to know!
After dinner last night (nothing fancy, just grilled cheese--that is, gruyère with a little dijon mustard on multigrain freedom bread--with artichoke salad, coleslaw, and limonata; dessert, lemon ice with fresh cherries macerated in Gran Marnier), I remarked tomonshu, "See, it doesn't take a lot of money to live well, just a reasonable amount." We'd just finished watching another British series, one in which a character is having trouble deciding whether to blow £250,000 on a yacht or not, and that rather skewed my perspective. After a moment's thought, I said, "And by 'reasonable', I mean 'more than 9/10 of the world makes'." After all, it's merely "normal" to take home the pay of two dozen average Chinese workers, right?
grunter today (everyone go and cheer him up; he's coming over all mopey again), I dreamt of interviewing Martha Stewart last night. (I blame some supermarket tabloid I saw at the convenient next to monshu's which had a doctored photo of her looking all bloated.)She was fixing canapés on camera (for that, blame BBC America and the episode of Faking It they broadcast last night) with a friend of mine and I asked her, "What do you consider anal?" She rather dodged the question by mentioning her philosophy major in college and then going off on a tangent about how she almost chose to study law. I ventured, "If you had become a lawyer instead of a stockbroker, things would have ended up much different today, right?" And she didn't kill me! In fact, afterward she whispered to me what good questions they were.
When I think about it in the cold light of day, I realise that those really are the questions I would ask if I had the chance. I believe that most people see their behaviour as basically "normal", even when they acknowledge that it's not something most people in the world do. So what does someone who thinks it "normal" to tie together an hors-d'œuvre with a single chive consider to be anal, obsessive behaviour? I have to know!
After dinner last night (nothing fancy, just grilled cheese--that is, gruyère with a little dijon mustard on multigrain freedom bread--with artichoke salad, coleslaw, and limonata; dessert, lemon ice with fresh cherries macerated in Gran Marnier), I remarked to
monshu, "See, it doesn't take a lot of money to live well, just a reasonable amount." We'd just finished watching another British series, one in which a character is having trouble deciding whether to blow £250,000 on a yacht or not, and that rather skewed my perspective. After a moment's thought, I said, "And by 'reasonable', I mean 'more than 9/10 of the world makes'." After all, it's merely "normal" to take home the pay of two dozen average Chinese workers, right?