Law Students

Steaks and Babies

By Pete

There are many things on the internet to read. Here are two of them.

Charlsie sent me a link to an article on a NY Times blog that pretty accurately describes a big chasm between two groups of people I know that plays out daily on my facebook newsfeed. It’s interesting to see people whose lives were nearly identical to mine just four or five years ago now running around married, with two kids, and a totally different life.

I imagine if we were to sit down for drinks, we’d have almost nothing to talk about except the Good Ol’ Days. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Most of my married friends now have children, the rewards of which appear to be exclusively intangible and, like the mysteries of some gnostic sect, incommunicable to outsiders. In fact it seems from the outside as if these people have joined a dubious cult: they claim to be much happier and more fulfilled than ever before, even though they live in conditions of appalling filth and degradation, deprived of the most basic freedoms and dignity, and owe unquestioning obedience to a capricious and demented master.

I have never even idly thought for a single passing second that it might make my life nicer to have a small, rude, incontinent person follow me around screaming and making me buy them stuff for the rest of my life. [Note to friends with children: I am referring to other people?s children, not to yours.] But there are also moments when some part of me wonders whether I am not only missing the biological boat but something I cannot even begin to imagine ? an entire dimension of human experience undetectable to my senses, like a flatlander scoffing at the theoretical concept of sky.

It’s good. Read the whole thing.

Changing gears, it comes as a surprise to some folks that I’ve actually never stepped foot outside of the continental U.S.. In fact, sometimes when this fact comes out, people look at me with a somewhat bewildered expression, as if they had walked into someone’s house to find them perched in front of an 8″ black-and-white TV set with rabbit ears.

My extraterritorial inexperience is not a function of some sort of xenophobia, more of the fact that it’s just downright inconvenient (and expensive) to go anywhere overseas… but an article entitled Argentina on Two Steaks a Day has me reconsidering the cost/benefit of that.

The classic beginner’s mistake in Argentina is to neglect the first steak of the day. You will be tempted to just peck at it or even skip it altogether, rationalizing that you need to save yourself for the much larger steak later that night. But this is a false economy, like refusing to drink water in the early parts of a marathon. That first steak has to get you through the afternoon and half the night, until the restaurants begin to open at ten; the first steak is what primes your system to digest large quantities of animal protein, and it’s the first steak that buffers the sudden sugar rush of your afternoon ice cream cone. The midnight second steak might be more the glamorous one, standing as it does a good three inches off the plate, but all it has to do is get you up and out of the restaurant and into bed (for the love of God, don’t forget to drink water).

Any piece of writing that starts with that paragraph should be read in its entirety . . . but try not to drool on your keyboard.

Full post as published by PeteHoliday.com on September 23, 2009 (boomark / email).