Meanderings 60-Yup......that's America....

Wow. Only 40 more meanderings more until I reach 100. At that time, I'll have a party. Most likely. Here are some things that make Americans truly "American." I have thought of all these in the past couple of days, after I observed #1....

1. I was driving home from the grocery store the other day, when I happened to drive by "South Beach Tanning" (a tanning salon, in case you havent figured that out). Standing outside the door of the salon was a chubby girl wearing clothes that were way too tight. She was texting. A chubby girl wearing too-tight clothes standing outside of a tanning salon texting. YUP, I said to myself, THAT IS AMERICA.....

2. In most any other country, when cooks make something a "salad," it usually means they are adding some type of vegetable collection to the beef or chicken or whatever.....like maybe they are adding lettuce or spinach or julienned carrots or something. You have to wonder why we are all so overweight when, in America, making something a "salad" means you simply add MAYONNAISE to it. Have a can of tuna? Want to make tuna "salad?" Add mayo. Potatoes? Add mayo, and you've now got potato salad. Same for seafood, chicken, macaroni, etc.....

3. The American restaurant-goers decency as a human being is inversely proportional to how loud they ask for chopsticks at their local Chinese restaurant. You know....so EVERYONE can see how important they are for using them. Chopsticks? Come on. Unless you use chopsticks for all your meals, all you are being is an elitist showoff. You probably order "spring rolls" instead of egg rolls too. Why does people using chopsticks bother me so much? I dont know. I think because there is this certain liberal arrogance Americans have where they have to "one up" each other as to how "cultured" they are; the usage of chopsticks is like the "poster child" for this type of haughtiness. I've actually been out to Asian restaurants with people who are appalled that I dont use them.... like if you dont use chopsticks, then you are just a fat, ignorant American carbo-addict. I mean this without the slightest bit of sarcasm: What is the advantage or reasoning behind chopsticks? If anything, it looks like rice would be the most inconvenient thing on earth to eat with two wooden sticks. But what do I know....

4. The first lesson American kids get in how much the world in which we live makes no logical sense whatsoever comes when they buy their first pack of crayolas, and see the ever present "white" crayon amidst the "real" crayons. The white crayon is the crayon who sits alone at all the junior high dances; the white crayon has probably turned emo from both the lack of attention it gets and the uselessness of its own existence. I pity the white crayon. Why does crayola include a white crayon? You can't see it on white paper, and, no matter how hard you bear down with it on colored paper, all it looks like is that you either sneezed on your construction paper and then smeared it across the 8x10....OR that a slug from your dad's tomato garden has just traversed the blank space. Either way, gross and useless.

So that is what I have been thinking about over the last two days.