| The Magical Rice Cooker, Strange and Estranged and The Family Sideshow
I avoided a row with mum today re: a rice cooker. Her and dad insisted on a Tatung rice cooker that can cook ten cups of rice. TEN CUPS of RICE is enough to feed TEN PEOPLE. "But it will last for ten years and you can cook fish and soup or even fish soup if it pleases you," they say ignoring every rationale I have for not wanting a ten cup rice cooker. I tell them about my three cup cooker that cost only twelve at CVS. "Oh that's nothing. That's useless," they say one after another knifing my ingenuity with each jib jab. Then I ask how much. Big mistake. The damn thing cost a hundred bucks and mom had no problem accepting my check for the cooker - the cooker I repeatedly said did not want. Their giant cooker insults my puny little cooker's sensibility. Part of me wanted to rebel, jump around with my hands on my ears stomping but then I hung my head wrote a check and took the damn cooker. At least the inner pot is stainless steel. My aluminum inner pot causes parkinson's I hear. My grandma has parkinsons. Wait, didn't she uses a Tatung cooker. Tatung rice cooker is the standard operating rice cooker of Taiwan. Everybody who's anybody cooks with Tatung. In face nobodies cook with tatung. Not having a tatung is simply untaiwanese. Could I just be not taiwanese then? Can't I have a CVS made in China rice cooker? Is that such a crime that my cooker only cooks three cups. I mean three makes sense: breakfast, lunch and dinner. What the hell am I going to do with ten cups of friggin rice. Doesn't rice turn to glucose and give you diabetes? I dunno. But I have a hundred dolla rice cooker whether i like it or not. Anybody want to come to my rice party?
My dad brought up the estranged dealings with my sibling at dinner. I think it rather strange for such a topic to be brought up during dinner in the middle of a pleasant conversation designed to de-estrange the estrangement. I had hoped all along that the parental units would simply take him aside and come to an understanding with him and perhaps they had without letting me in on it. But I doubt it. There's never more a time I need to keep my guard up than now. The more I learn the more I learn about the concept of responsibility and that is this; the individual is responsible for everything that happens to him good or bad. It doesn't matter if the individual is a victim, a random missle hits him, even rape and robbery. The individual owns his problems. They never go away. They can be spread to others but the problem stays witht the individual always and it is up to the individual to solve these problems through whatever means. If God doesn't like you that's just too bad. Fight God, join God. If you have no control then that makes you his bitch. If you have control that makes you God doesn't it. There's always a price to be paid. If it were up to me I'd just press all the buttons at the nuclear missile silo. Then we all become responsible and for a moment I become God.
But all this is a sideshow to a bigger drama that is of course ultimately encased in the ultimate drama of the universe. Being responsible also means to recognize that being a victim and / or being an individual doesn't make you the center of the universe however much you'd cry about it and lobby for it. People are dyng all around us. Well, perhaps not dying per se but all of my grandparents have gone beyond their expected life spans so they live on borrowed time. One has been on her deathbed for twenty years withering away day by day. Elsewhere cancer has struck, diabetes, blindness, hyper tension, estranged sons, debt, paranoia.........the list goes on. What makes us so special that we demand so much attention? What makes me so special? Then answer is nothing. We must all own our problems. We must all be responsible. This extravagence, this exuberance is all temporary... a temporary reprieve from a harsh eighteen months in exile. I may wager more hardship may come my way.
|
