Only fools Russian….
I’m going to be 25 this June. I’m still single with no prospects and no dependents. I’m renting a room in an overpriced Bay Area apartment. My mom and stepdad are within “I’m crying on the phone because there’s a spider in my bathtub” range. My mother was 25 years old when she had me. My mother was married; my mother owned a house and she lived further than 45 minutes away from her parents. I’d be lying if I didn’t say that part of me gets overwhelmed when I think about how far behind I feel in relation to this. When I was half my age I would have told you I planned to be having my first child by now too. At 20 I would have told you I should be getting married at least around now with plans to have a child in two years or so. Now standing here at the precipice of being halfway through my twenties I feel like marriage, kids, the picket fence…they are years away—if ever.
Despite the fact that the only thing I know I can plan is for life to upset my plans, I still have all these guidelines for the love and marriage thing. The underlying strategy to these guidelines follows that old idiom “only fools rush in.” Marriage would follow years of dating—children should be held off until the marriage is at least two years tested. A home should only be bought in a neighborhood that’s been thoroughly vetted for these theoretical children’s future education from K through 12. Definitely can’t have a kid until I’m ready to simultaneously start saving for their college fund! All these well intentioned plans that are meant to keep me safe and secure and probably will ensure I never do any of the above.
At what point does this need for security become an excuse to not do any of it? Is the truth really that I’m just bloody effing terrified of these very permanent life changes? Will I ever be as brave as my mother was at my age?
I mean I say I’m focusing on my career. It’s true but if I really wanted to, if I really wanted to I could set aside the money and raise a kid. I could do it. 
I’m physically at the right stage. I’ve got a real job with real future prospects. I’m just too damn selfish, too damn scared and well I would ideally like to have a life partner to raise a child with so I’m not really equipped but still…I could do it on my own. Is there an opposite phrase for “Only Fools Rush In” something like “and even bigger fools need to be pulled in kicking and screaming?” I know plenty of people who do…well the opposite of what I think should be done and they do it quite well.
Am I just making excuses hidden under the guise of wisdom? What do you think? Do you have similar “rules” for planning your future? Oddly enough this all popped into my head because sometimes when I go for a run at work I find reruns of Roseanne on and I’ll watch them. As far as sitcoms go this show really was something special. It was actually clever, had continuity and managed to be thought provoking at times. It wasn’t just some crass weekly potato about blue collar, white trash in Middle America. The opening is always the family seated around a dinner table, interacting and loving each other. I do have a craving for that in my life.
But until I’m ready to give up these selfish ways of my single youth, I can only supply the family meal and not the family. That’s where this dish comes in—nothing screams Sunday night family dinner more than a classic from my cultural heritage: Beef Stroganoff. The Jewish side of my family comes from the Ukraine/Russia Ashkenazi tribe and despite having never been to the “mother country” I seem to have retained some sort of cultural tastebuds. My passion for fermented vegetable juices, cabbage soups, beets…not exactly American. This main course will appeal to non-Russian Jews though as it’s really just a big pot of pasta, meat and creamy mushroom sauce. In fact it should appeal to everyone BUT jews since as we all know mixing dairy and meat is decidedly not-kosher. Oops. Well like I said…I’m Jewish. I don’t keep Kosher year round…and I’m fairly certain Nana would approve of this meal. “If it’s clean, it’s Kosher”
The flavor is OFF THE CHARTS out of this world amazing. I know it’s far from the healthy food I eat most of the time, but this is exactly the sort of thing I crave when I really want to indulge once in a while. It’s warm and filling in your stomach. A more “Russian” approach might be to spike the sauce with vodka instead of red wine, but I guess the one thing I didn’t inherit in my cultural genetics was a love for that fermented potato juice. It’s just…gross. I think the red wine adds more body to the sauce–some cognac would be nice too. Play with it if you like but just remember this: it’s not stroganoff without the mushrooms. Yes mushrooms. It’s just not stroganoff without them.
“Rush-in” Beef Stroganoff
An Olivia Original – to serve 4 Read more
Even so I always refrained from using racial slurs or references to homosexuality as part of my salty repertoire. For my generation avoiding some of the more notorious and long-standing racial slurs has been taught from birth. We know better than to use Huck Finn language, the terms our grandparents will still use to our horror, but I was always frustrated by the acceptance of terms like “Gay” and “Fag” as a young child. I would lecture my peers, practically handing out S.P.E.W. badges in my more righteous moments, and even refused to associate with kids who didn’t understand why it was wrong.
I’m not about to stop cursing anytime soon. I find it too cathartic. Maybe I’ll have an epiphany about that sometime in the future. I can’t make any promises. I also am not going to stop thinking that shallow, lazy and willfully ignorant people are annoying. I simply cannot abide useless people. I will stop using the word retard in a manner that implies someone born with an intellectual disability is useless. There are those born disadvantaged and those who simply choose not to use the healthy brains they were given. When so many in the handicapped community work to overcome the obstacles they were given, not only was I being insulting but I was being inaccurate in using “retard” to describe someone who chooses to be lazy. The only thing I hate more than being an insensitive jerk is being a wrong, insensitive jerk. I was wrong to lower those with born mental disadvantages to be on the same level as creeps and lazy assholes. When I saw it from that perspective, I was appalled at myself.
Pork and Shellfish are off the table. Always. Pork is considered “unclean” and shellfish were “bottom feeders” and therefore forbidden. Pork also had the nasty habit of carrying the aforementioned parasite and shellfish even today when prepared incorrectly can carry a slew of nasty bacteria. Cholera is a horrifying way to die. Additionally rodents, insects, reptiles and amphibians are all forbidden. So just don’t go to Asia.
I think the turtles are somewhat special compared to these other shows. Most of the other comic-cartoon adaptations on tv started a few decades before as comics and already had a large following. The Power Rangers part of a longstanding tradition of adapting and repackaging products of Japanese pop-culture to appeal to Western tastes. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on the other hand were entirely American conceived during my childhood. I think that’s why so many of the late 20-somethings I know proudly deck themselves out in TMNT gear and nostalgia. It’s ours and it’s pure candy for our viewing pleasure. The series doesn’t really explore deeper social issues like X-Men did and it doesn’t have the kind of heavy drama that Spiderman or Batman did. It didn’t try to propagandize us like Captain Planet did. DISCLAIMER: I’m not saying caring about the environment is bad but seriously let’s at least acknowledge that show was some heavy handed propaganda. Fern Gully too. Nope TMNT was just four radical dudes, who happened to be turtles, fighting crime and eating that American delicacy, the pizza pie. And they were a hit.
While it’s highly exaggerated in fictional form, there are a lot of real world scary “mad” science things we could be doing today that are prevented only by morality. We could, for example, clone a human being. Today. We have the technology. The implications of such an act are what keeps scientists from doing it. Rumors have emerged from time to time that China has done it – you choose to believe what you want there—but I don’t doubt that someday, someone somewhere, will toss consequences over his/her shoulder and actually make it happen. Which leads to another interesting question about this kind of “fringe” science: if we can do it, shouldn’t we do it since someone else will and at least doing it first means we can control what happens? Oh another delicious, delectable moral qualm that makes for amazing pieces of speculative fiction. I wonder how often this was discussed by the members of the Manhattan project. I really need to read more about that…. Damn it goodreads list, why do you keep growing??
My biggest frustration though with “mad” science is how often things get labeled as “Frankenscience” when the truth is so few people really understand the science they fear. Oh god. See right there? That can definitely be the refrain of someone who is “going mad” can’t it? But it has some truth to it. Like I said I majored in the field of Biotechnology and get very frustrated with people who hold strong opinions on the subject of genetically engineered food yet understand almost nothing about it. These individuals would most certainly call me a mad scientist for supporting certain applications of the technology—or for my personal desire to develop luminescent trees to line streetwalks with. Aside from how freaking pretty that would be, it’s like the ultimate form of green energy. Oh and yes I THOUGHT OF THAT BEFORE SEEING AVATAR OKAY? Ironically enough, while we could clone a human being today, developing these trees is still outside our realm as I currently understand it. Many people are familiar with GFP, green fluorescent protein, which could work but requires a black light to be seen. From what I’m aware of, experiments that utilize luciferase (the protein that lets fireflies light up) have failed to produce enough protein to make any impact without overloading the cell machinery and killing the plants. Again though I haven’t looked into this in a few years and I really should read up on it.
dumbbell was two weeks ago. Just to provide a source of reference. The reason no one ever believes that yoga can build muscle is because most Americans are more familiar with a fairly passive, meditative yoga. Bikram is nothing like that. It is 90 minutes of stretching and compression postures utilizing isometrics in a room heated to 105 degrees with 40% humidity. You ever try doing squats, holding your arms out in front of you, and holding it for 3 minutes? Now do that in a HOT room. It will kick your yoga mocking butt. There’s no staring into crystals and sighing “Ommmmm” in that room.
