Sunday 30 May 2004
Annette and Jonathan
I realized a while ago that things aren’t “worse” today than they were back in the “good old days”, at least not in most of the ways people claim they are. I’m skeptical of most claims of that type now.
Things also aren’t really so “normal” in one’s own culture and “weird” in that of others, but that’s a different topic.
It’s too easy to romanticize the past; you understood less the “evils” of the world when you were younger, which in pretty much all cases happens to have been… in the past. And often the new isn’t really bad, it’s just different.
The other day, I made Julie some macaroni and cheese (no table wine for her, though). As I sat down next to her, I asked her if it was good.
Her response was that yes, it was good, but not as good as “real macaroni”.
I wondered for a moment what was not real about what I’d just made and then realized that what constitutes “real macaroni” for Julie is Easy Mac, the kind that takes four minutes in the microwave. I had made her boxed macaroni, the kind that requires seven minutes and a stove.
I thought it odd that in her ontology, this is less “real” than Easy Mac. I had to suppress a “kids today with their new-fangled macaroni technology”-feeling due to my aforementioned philosophy.
The next day at the grocery store, I found myself trying to decide on which boxed adult macaroni to get: store-brand or “real.”
“Real,” for me, is Kraft brand.
I’ve never seen a store-brand macaroni’s orange cheese-like powder match the color, texture, and sheen of Kraft’s.