Here's the Ying, Now Where's the Yang

I certainly don’t need to preach that we live in a very complex and very complicated world right now. Situations seem to be boiling over in all parts of the world, all at the same time. I am sure this happened before in the history of the planet, but in those days we were not as globally aware of everything that was occurring. The phrase, “out of sight, out of mind” certainly would have described that mind-set. Things that we would never be exposed to come into our house on a voluntary basis or as an intrusion almost every day of the week. To be honest, I don’t need a daily phone call just when I am sitting down to dinner with my family to let me in on a great deal from my bank, your bank, or anybody elses’ bank for that matter. It is nice they think of me and all, but a letter that I could ignore would have the same effect.

I don’t know if it was out of a morbid sense of curiosity or whether there was a inner demon working at the time, but a few years ago I did a few clicks on my computer and watched the execution of Saddam Hussein when it was making its’ rounds on virtually every web page on Earth. At first, I kept thinking, “Okay, here is a very bad man, getting what he deserves”. I don’t think anyone on this Earth would ever be able to tally how many lives this particular man destroyed as he plundered, raped and invaded countries. But still as I watched this video, all I could see was a poor, pitiful, broken old man being hung. I really did have to shake myself and remind myself what this person did to millions of people. Anyone who allows his son to torture the national soccer team because they lost a game really is not quite fit to roam the surface of this planet in my books. But then that does raise the question. Does anyone, no matter what they have done, deserve to die? That is an argument that has been debated for a lot longer than I have been around and I am sure will continue a lot longer after I am gone.

Still that image and thought has stayed with me for quite a while as I thought about very bad things that happen to very bad people. I don’t know anybody who was directly or indirectly affected by Saddam’s life, so it is hard to say. From a global perceptive there are two points of view, one is that he was a maniacal tyrant who deserved everything he got (the US point of view) and the other was that he was a merciless dictator who held together the tenuous relationship of tribal factions in an area that didn’t respect democratically made borders or treaties. A delicate balance of order and terror which kept the lid on the country, and something which was greatly disturbed when he was removed from the picture. Chaos ensued in a vacuum of organized brutality.

The scales seem to swing wildly, back and forth between extremes, one would think that there has to be a balance somewhere, a Ying and Yang of the world. For every bad thing out there, I am sure there are very good things out there that happen to very good people, we just don’t hear about them all the time. Our media prefers to dwell on the bad things as it makes for better press and better sales. But every once in a while we hear of someone, a nice, hardworking someone, who is down on their luck and things are looking as bleak as they can possibly be and then using their last two dollars, they buy a lottery ticket and find themselves the following morning richer than they ever dreamed. Good things that happen to good people.

But even though we are often happy, if not out-right pleased when bad things happen to bad people, unfortunately sometimes very bad things happen to very good people. It is at times like this that I look to the sky and implore, “ What the Hell are you thinking about?”

I find myself exposed to this more and more in my life as my friends and family age. A friend of mine died shortly before Christmas a few years ago. This definitely fell into the realm of very bad things. He was younger and in better shape than I and certainly deserved to stay around a lot longer. As I sat one evening thinking about how delicate everything is in this world was and thinking how horrible the timing was for this disease to claim him. I heard the most heartwarming thing I have heard in many, many years. Just before he died, he had ordered Christmas presents for his family and had them delivered to his home shortly before the 25th . I am sure his spirit was in the room as they unwrapped their presents on Christmas morning. He gave them what was truly an almost impossible present, a wonderful time in what would have been the darkest Christmas of their lives. He took the shadow out of that very bad thing and was able to shine a little light for all of us to see and maybe restore a little balance in the world.

Look! Up in the sky! It's Supertaster!

When I was a child, I always had a rather up and down relationship with food, a kind of uneasy truce. I was what adults liked to distainingly call a “picky” eater. Not that I out and out rejected food on my plate as being just weird looking (although there were some food stuffs that definitely fell into that category), I was just acutely aware that I would get pretty sick to my stomach if I ate certain foods. Nowadays this is referred to as Hyper Sensitive Tastebud Syndrome, the possessors of this syndrome called Supertasters. It is probably the only group of individuals with the prefix super that I will ever be a member of. I know of several occasions I defied Newton’s Third Law of Physics where there is an equal and opposite reaction to an exerted force. I could put one piece of broccoli in my mouth and spew over three quarts of “unequal opposite reaction” back out.. It was definitely Linda Blair quantities. Still, food was more often than not, ordered from my plate to my mouth and then I involuntarily and inevitably delivered it back to my plate, the hallway and bathroom floor and point in between as I ran with hands plastered over my mouth. This always seemed to take people by surprise. It wasn’t that I didn’t particularly dislike the taste of whatever food it was, it was just once the flap of flesh at the back of my throat started the Sammy Davis Junior tap dance on the roof of my mouth, it was a foregone conclusion that whatever went down was going to come right back up and out.

Over the years my attitude towards food changed. I am not sure if this empowerment of having a choice in what I ate, when I ate or even, if I ate. During my teens I often compared eating to an addictive drug. My rather flawed logic was you could die of an overdose of food, you suffered from withdrawal pains and you had massive cravings that only using food could ease. I would often trot this out when people told me I ate like a bird. Considering my past experience of regurgitation, they weren’t far off. However, as I got older I started to appreciate not only eating food, I should add that I did eventually get over the throwing up part, but also cooking has become one of my favourite things to do. As any cook will tell you, there is nothing more gratifying than having people enjoy what you have made.

Cooking is like any other pastime, the more you do it the more you find that you never seem to have enough tools to complete the job properly. I find this is true whether you are building a house or making a cake. On top of that, throw in enticements from any number of cooking shows on the Food Network where you’ll see an array of seemingly indispensable tools that every cook should have. Having the right tools just makes things easier, the secret is when to know you have enough of them. Unlike most guy’s, my attraction to gadgets didn’t stop with electronic stores or golf stores. Cooking stores have become one of my favourite haunts. I can browse the shelves for hours, first off trying to figure out exactly what the tool is for and then whether or not I would have any use for it. I am sure there are just a handful of things that are really needed, but that never stopped me before. I should show you my electronics drawer sometime. My wife is a bit more pragmatic about things. When in the height of strawberry season I thought we should buy a strawberry huller to take the cap off the strawberries she just looked at me, held up her hand and pinched her forefinger together with her thumb. My defending reason that the huller was shiny carried very little weight. I won’t go into her responses for (in no particular order) a pickle container (okay, she said “What? A jar?”), the difference between a vegetable scrubber, a potato scrubber and a mushroom scrubber, pizza scissors or an avocado slicer.

It was during one of these trips to a local store that when I looked down the row upon row of gadgets that included among other things, an individual slicer for every vegetable and fruit on the planet, planers, mandolin’s and graters of every size and configuration, pot holders, spoon holders, hard butter holders, soft butter holders, plastic banana, apple and orange holders (I am still waiting for individual ones for grapes) that it occurred to me that I would need a pantry the size of the master bedroom to hold every utensil that there is available. Although this was certainly an entertaining thought, the idea of determining which of the slicers is for which fruit or vegetable would probably send me into a spasm of indecision. Then there would be whether or not I would be violating some code of cooking ethics if I used an egg slicer to slice a small tomato. But I guess until I have one of those Food Network kitchens the size of a stadium and a budget to match, I will do with what I have available. If it was up to my wife, a utensil drawer would probably consist of a sharp knife or two. But fortunately for me, as long as I keep my strange little utensils out of her way and continue serving up some delicious morsels, she is quite happy to let me indulge in my collecting habit, however useless they may be.