Soul Food

What is it about cooking that makes it such a bonding experience? I have noticed this many times in my life, but particularly strongly over the weekend as I was helping my mom, aunt, and grandmommy prepare a large family meal. It seems to me that the bonding aspect is largely feminine - while my dad loves to cook, he prefers to do it alone, rather than explaining exactly what he needs done to someone else. (To be fair, my uncle did teach me how to cook asparagus this weekend.) Whenever I cook with my female relatives, on the other hand, it's a leisurely process, with lots of conversation and nibbling. Boring, repetitive tasks like washing vegetables, which I would ordinarily complain about, become social activities. I suppose this could all be biological - prehistoric origins as hunter-gatherers, tight-knit female subculture, etc. But while I've seen it the most with other females, it happens in mixed company too (obviously I can't speak for all-male groups...maybe if it involves grills and gratuitious amounts of lighter fluid?). My senior class's school auction project was to create a college-student-worthy cookbook, and we all got together to cook our recipes. Some of them were quite tasty, and it was great fun to cram everyone into a moderately-sized kitchen and cook up a storm. Usually if you had put all of us in such a small space for an extended period of time there would have been more than a few unkind words exchanged, given the clashing personalities of some of our class members, but there was remarkable equanimity, even camaraderie, since we were all working on a common project. Does the fact that that common project was cooking have anything to do with it? Who knows...But also consider that cooking together is considered to be a very romantic date. Why? My guess is that cooking is usually something one does in an intimate setting (i.e. at home), so when you cook with other people you are sharing that intimacy with them. Other explanations? Please share!

"And again, with feeling..."

The last post was far too sappy. I'm not sure what came over me. Time for a good rant! Today I went clothes shopping. Can you guess the topic yet? I would like to lodge an official complaint against the clothing industry, especially the mainstream manufacturers of "fashions" for teenage girls. They hardly qualify as clothes at all. Most items can be worn only a few times before they fall apart - and that's if you don't wash them. Who decided that shirts as thin as tissue paper were a good idea? They don't keep you warm, they lose their shape almost immediately, and as a college student I don't have unlimited time to devote to making sure my clothes don't fall apart in the process of becoming clean. Most of the jeans I saw were way beyond distressed. They were anguished, tormented, tortured even. If you want your jeans to have holes, make them yourself (climb a tree, maybe?). I even saw "distressed" shoes. Personally, I like my feet to be warm, and if I'm going to pay a heinous amount of money for shoes I want them to last. I've never understood why taking fabric out of a garment increases its value. The axiom that you get what you pay for doesn't seem to hold up.

Quality aside, the clothes themselves are making fashion statements that ought to be censored. (Note: if you're thinking "hey, I like to dress like that!" - I honestly don't care how you dress if you're a nice person. I just don't care to do the same myself.) Yes, I know why the shirts are so thin (if you're going to wear a practically nonexistent shirt, at least go back and read my bra rant - there are some things we don't want to see) and low-cut, the jeans so tight, etc. I am fully aware that everyone has the right to dress how she wants, but it would be nice if there were a few more (mainstream) options between tart and frumpy old lady. I also wish the trends hadn't trickled down first to tween clothes, then little kids, and now even toddlers and infants. Little kids ought to be wearing comfy clothes (and so should big kids, if you ask me - comfort rules).

If the world were slower-paced and people cared a little more about quality, I would vote to bring back tailors and dressmakers. How amazing would that be, to have someone custom-make clothes just for you? As it is, I'm far to lazy to make my own clothes, so I'll just sit here and complain. I will add that I did manage to buy two pairs of jeans (fray- and hole-free, I might add) at the Gap, which has maintained a certain level of quality in its clothes. I'm also sometimes a fan of New York & Co. But two stores out of the whole mall worth shopping in? We as consumers ought to demand a lot better.

Ghost of Christmas Past

This year, I almost missed Christmas. I've felt the Christmas spirit slipping away from me the past few years - the anticipation of Christmas morning, the expectancy all through the month of December, the "specialness" of everything having to do with Christmas. In response, I've tried harder every year to do Christmasy things, to recapture the spirit of the season. Singing carols, wrapping presents, playing our collection of Christmas CDs nonstop since I've been home - nothing worked. Christmas snuck up on me. I'd blame it on the lack of snow, but as a Texan I should be used to that.

I think part of it is the busyness of my family. We don't have time for the traditional Advent activities we've always done. In past years, my parents have written messages containing family activities, from going to look at Christmas lights to sharing favorite Christmas memories, and slipped them in each pocket of our Advent calendar. The past few years we forgot a few days, but this year we didn't bother at all. The first two weeks I wasn't home, and there was just too much going on at work and school for everyone else. I think another part of it is that my brother and sister have finally caught on to the myth of Santa Claus. That means no more letters to the North Pole, no more cookies and milk on Christmas Eve. This year, our Christmas Eve conversation went like this: "Is a cubic foot of lead heavier than a cubic foot of gold? My periodic table doesn't say." "I don't know. Hallie, will you Google it?" And our traditional reading of "The Night Before Christmas" was punctuated with serious debates of the definition of sugarplum and the doubtful attribution of the poem. My family may have gotten too intellectual for its own good.

Still, no matter how busy or weird my family is, that can't be the only reason. Part of it must simply be about growing up. I can now happily go to bed early on Christmas Eve, sleep soundly, and complain about being dragged from my bed by my younger siblings to see the stockings. Gone are the days when I awoke anxiously every hour to check the clock and debate exactly how early I could awaken my parents. Gone also is the hushed, glowing anticipation of the night before Christmas - I spent it IMing friends and idly surfing the internet. Christmas morning came and went; presents were opened, lunch was eaten, and we all settled down with our books or laptops to while away the day. And then it was over. But while the magic seems to be mostly gone, a different feeling has replaced it. I now understand why my mom says family is the most important thing to her at Christmas. More than the presents, which I could take or leave (as a college student I don't have room for more stuff anyway), and even my mom's amazing Christmas dinner, cheesy as it sounds, I was just happy to be home and surrounded by my family. Is this new, quieter, more adult Christmas spirit better than the butterflies-in-the-stomach, sparkling Christmas spirit of the years before? I wish I could have both, but I guess I can settle for growing up.

Apologia of a Reformed Grammar Nazi

This semester I took an introduction to linguistics called "The Unity and Diversity of Human Language." It was all interesting and completely new to me, but I didn't find any of the concepts particularly shocking until we started discussing sociolinguistics. I was suddenly informed that, linguistically speaking, there is no such thing as standard English - it is a socioeconomic construct of the elite, and it is therefore improper to place value judgments on different dialects of English because they vary in systematic ways and are all equally linguistically valid. I was profoundly disturbed. I've been a self-proclaimed "grammar nazi" as long as I can remember (thanks in great part to my mother). Suddenly, I discovered that the kind of grammar I'm so particular about has no linguistic basis at all - it's what linguists call "prescriptive grammar" (as opposed to universal grammar), and in terms of the biological basis of human language, there is no reason for it to exist. Rules of prescriptive grammar are the kind you learn in high school English - don't end a sentence with a preposition, don't split the infinitive, use "whom" in the objective case, etc. It turns out that the reason we learn these rules in school is because they're completely unnecessary to our effective communication in English (and by effective communication I mean day-to-day conversations with other speakers). Everything we truly need to know about English comes from the principles and parameters of universal grammar that facilitate our childhood language acquisition - and as far as linguists can tell, there are no parameters involving the usage of whom or split infinitives. Prescriptive grammar is entirely a sociolinguistic phenomenon, a set of language "fads" perpetuated by the dialect of the class in power. I'm not likely to forget all the rules of prescriptive grammar I've so carefully memorized, but you can rest assured that in future I will stop and think before I "correct" your grammar.

Required Reading for Life

This summer, I read a book called You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation by Deborah Tannen. Chances are, if I talked to you around the beginning of July, I told you about it whether you wanted to hear or not. It's one of those books that presents something you have always intuitively known in such a way that you can consciously understand it. We all know about "girl talk" and "guy talk," and most of the time we keep our conversations in the appropriate realms. But we've probably experienced an encounter where we just didn't get the response we expected. Tannen explains this friction as a conflict of what she terms "genderlects."

Her main premise is that men and women have fundamentally different conversational styles and goals, and that ignoring them is more dangerous than acknowledging them. I didn't find her views sexist, since for the most part she avoiding placing value judgments on either style. She claims that women primarily engage in "rapport talk," while men prefer "report talk." My own metaphor for this distinction is horizontal versus vertical conversation. While both genders practice some combination of the two styles, women generally use conversation as a way of establishing bonds with others, while men use it to communicate information and reinforce social status (a sort of verbal one-upsmanship). One manifestation of this difference is in the two genders' handling of what Tannen calls "troubles talk." When men talk about problems, they are seeking solutions; women, on the other hand, are seeking sympathy. Both genders also use their own approaches when problems are brought to them - men offer to solve them, while women try to empathize. These fundamentally different approaches mean that men and women both often end up feeling frustrated with one another because they don't receive the response they expected.

Both these premises only scrape the surface of the content of this fascinating book - I highly encourage you all to read it. It will change the way you view conversations, and may go a long way to helping you understand frustrating situations.