cellar door

Again, late in the game with knowing who the Naked and the Famous is but this is an addicting song

Took this a few weeks ago at Scripps Pier in La Jolla, CA

So late in the game with knowing who Cults is, oh well… this song has been on repeat on my iPod for 2 weeks in a row now

My parents love to eat out. When they were growing up, their families were nowhere near poverty but they weren’t necessarily well-off, either. Both families had meal on the dinner table every night, but it was only on special occasions like someone’s birthday where they got to eat a food of luxury. Now that my parents are pretty well-off, they take advantage of the fact that they are privileged enough to eat whatever they want to eat without hardly ever having to think about how expensive the food is. If there is one couple who live to eat (and not eat to live), it is my parents. And they love sharing that sacred meal time with others. My parents go out to dinner with family friends on an average of three times a week, and most of the time, when I have the chance, I follow them out to dinner because I am the daughter of two people who live to eat, and I always know I’m going to be eating something delicious. 

But this post isn’t actually about eating food. After dinner, when all of our bellies are stuffed and none of us can eat another bite, there comes that moment when the waitress drops off the check at the table… and all Hell breaks loose. All of the adults sitting around at the table suddenly sit up and make a mad scramble to snatch the check away first. The first adult to get his hands around the check hides it away so no one else can get a hold of it. He declares that he is getting this for everybody and they should all just calm down and let him pay for the meal. Then, there are protests from all of the other adults around the table, proclaiming they should be the ones paying for the meal. Sometimes, they even get up from their chair and walk around to the person holding the check and physically try to wrestle the check away from him. But in the end, the first person who gets his hands on the check pays for everyone at the dinner table and that’s that. 

When I was younger, I didn’t understand these fights for the check. Why would someone be so willing, even beg, to shell out $200 from his pocket to pay for everyone’s meal? Don’t people generally want to save money? Why are these people so eager to just give their money away? 

Now that I’m an adult myself, I understand exactly what my parents and their friends are thinking when they make a mad dash for that check. Paying for someone’s meal is a sign of respect. The person paying for the whole meal is honored to be taking care of everyone else. It is not a show about who has more money. It is not a display of affluence. The person paying for the table’s meal may have less money than others present at the table. It is a privilege to pay for someone’s meal. And of course, the person(s) whose meal is getting paid for SHOULD be grateful, and should vow to pay for the next meal (or at least for after-dinner drinks). 

SHOULD be grateful. Right? As I find myself naturally doing the same thing my parents and their friends do with the whole mad-dash-for-the-check act, I am also discovering who my real friends are and who aren’t. In fact, my short list of real friends only consists of people who fight with me over the check left at the dinner table. None of us have that much money to spare, but we still like to show each other that we really care for one another. The mad-dash-for-the-check act is a test to see who respects you and who doesn’t. Unfortunately there are people out there who have taken advantage of me paying for their meals over and over, and not once have they volunteered to pick up the tab. Pretty soon I stop calling them to invite them out and I try not to accept their invitations to go out because I know I will end up paying for the check again. Again, it’s not about the money. It is about who has your back. It is about who will take care of you. It is about respect. And these people who don’t have your back are the absolute worst. They don’t even say thank you when you pay for them, like the only reason you are there is to pay for their drink or food. One of them has even said to me while I was picking up the tab, “well, if you really want to pay for it…” No, man. I don’t “really want to pay for it,” especially now, since you don’t understand that me paying for you isn’t about preventing your ass from going broke, which is what they think, almost all of the time. Instead of seeing it as a sign of respect, they almost see is as me being responsible for their tab because they think I have more money than they do, thus, I shoiuld pay for their tab. Newsflash: I don’t have that much money. I work to support myself. I pay for my own rent, food, utilities, gas, and my student loans. Then whatever I have left is for fun and entertainment. I don’t have that much left over after I pay off all of my bills. If I pick up your tab, it is because I want to show you that I have your back. Not because I have a lot of money to waste. 

I’ve never laughed harder at a meme… I’m still laughing a full minute later…

(Source: hartfordblues, via clairedallas)

I don’t even fucking like science but this shit is pretty rad

I’ve been getting a lot of backhand comments lately from various people about the foods I choose to eat. If you know me, you know I’ll try anything at least once, regardless of what it is. Frog legs, snails, dog, tripe, larva, goat, I’ve had it all. I respect every culture’s cuisine enough to give it all a go. (Except I probably will never eat a human, I know there are still some cannibalistic tribes out there…) Unless one is strictly vegan or vegetarian, I think it is completely ignorant and wrong for someone to deem one species of animal as acceptable to eat and another kind as wrong. It’s okay to eat a pig but it’s not okay to eat a dog? No no no no no. Granted I will NEVER eat my pet Pomeranian, but if I go to a place where there were dogs purely raised to be consumed by humans and someone roasted up a dog and served it to me on a plate, yes I will eat it. In fact, I have before. And I’ll do it again. To me it is the same as eating a chicken raised for eating. Just read the article. It explains it all.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/frame_game/2002/01/wok_the_dog.html

I have a raised flower bed in my backyard now! Well, I guess have THREE raised flower beds in my backyard now. My wonderful bf built me three flower beds with his two bare hands, filled them up with a ton of soil, and planted flowers in them as a gift to me for our one year anniversary, which was last weekend. :D

(And I only got him a custom T-shirt and a photo frame of us… I guess he got the short end of the stick lololololol)

I went to the Farmer’s Market the day afterwards and bought some seedlings for my new flower beds. I now have green onions, fennel, two types of basil, rosemary, and broccoli growing in my backyard in addition to my roommate’s bok choy, pineapple mint, and eggplant. YAY! 

(Taking care of plants also made me realize I really just want to be a homemaker. It would be awesome if I got to stay home all day to clean, cook, and take care of the garden and my future pets. Dogs only, no human babies or kitties allowed.)

Also this year I realized how much I am kind of over Halloween. Actually, I realized this year that I hate Halloween. I hate the decorations and the candy and the children and adults acting like children. I realize I am slowly becoming more like my mother every day. That’s okay though because my mother is an amazing woman. 

This is so great, I can’t believe I’ve never seen this before