I wonder sometimes if there is anyone else that gets bored of food. Not like standing and staring into the pantry or standing and staring into the fridge because you can’t think of what to cook for dinner one night. Or wandering around the supermarket gathering ingredients that have no business being together but they are the only things you could imagine eating. I’m talking about deep down food boredom. Or worse. Deep down life boredom. All consuming. Inside your soul. Inside the world. Boredom.
I love to cook. It’s one of the things that helps to define me when given a social questionnaire. At dinner parties or in meeting friends of friends in other situations, after they ask you the first question on their list, “What do you do?” and you chat about your job and theirs for a few minutes, justifying how you love it and hate it in equal measure. How your day to day routine is fulfilling and you’re lucky to have the benefits it brings. Or not. How you hate it but feel trapped because of your mortgage or your kids or your partner. After they ask you what you do, they inevitably ask “Do you have any hobbies?” or similarly, but more terrifyingly, “What do you enjoy doing?”
Cooking is one of the things I tend to say I enjoy doing. There is a long list I can pull from to answer the ‘enjoy doing’ question. Cooking. Travelling. Swimming. Galleries. Road trips. Adventures. Beaches. Going to markets. Reading. Going to the cinema. Live music. Festivals. It depends on where my focus is on that particular day. Usually what I’ve rehearsed talking about in the hour or so before the meeting of new people event is going to occur. After I’ve gotten ready but before it’s time to go. The nervous self question time, “What am I going to talk about to these people?”, “What questions should I ask?” and “How will I get through this evening looking charming and interesting and fun as opposed to what I really am?” (A track-suit pant wearing, coffee drinking, cooking curry for one, watching old episodes of my favourite tv shows while eating my dinner type person).
Sometimes I’m content with working in the hive. The billions of other worker bees and I are fine. I don’t want to rock the boat. I don’t want to hurt anybody. I don’t want anybody else to get hurt. And usually, I’m content to play my part. Do my job. Consume. Produce. Consume. Produce. Relax. Stress. Save. Spend. Fly away. Come home. Start all over again.
But other times I get bored.
I’m bored of grocery shopping and seeing everyone else grocery shopping. I’m bored of routines and going to friend’s houses talking about the same things. I’m bored of people’s dramas. I’m bored of my dramas. I’m bored of social networking. I’m bored of socialising. I’m bored of my town. I’m bored of my country. I’m bored of the news. I’m bored of everyone I know buying houses and stuff and getting married and having babies and buying more stuff and bigger houses and having more babies. I’m bored of conversations about which school kids should go to. I’m bored of arguing about the same stuff. I’m bored of wearing jeans. I’m bored of forgetting to buy a light bulb for the kitchen. I’m bored of the expectation that is finding love, which is supposed to fulfil you and make you feel fabulous, but inevitably makes you buy houses and stuff and have babies. And so on.
I’m even bored of cooking.
I look at everyone else and I can’t figure out what motivates them. I know that life is to live. I know that the meaning of life is to love. I just can’t imagine how and what it is that we should do for the rest of our lives. After we’ve lived it up in our twenties. After we’ve gone to university and shagged everything that moves and taken all the substances and drunken ourselves into amnesia. After we’ve travelled around the world with our best friends, a back-pack and no money.
And then in our thirties after we’ve had the kids and bought the houses and put the rings on our fingers and taken the rings off our fingers. After we’ve written a novel or made a film or painted a masterpiece or worked for a charity or consolidated our career.
After we’ve done everything that we’re supposed to do. After we’ve ticked all the boxes. After we wait and watch our kids grow up. And then tend to our gardens. And fill up our lives with the day to day to day. Coffees with friends. Plane rides to destinations. New restaurants. New loves. New books. New jobs and houses and dramas. Grandchildren. Great grandchildren. Decades to decades.
What, then, am I going to cook for dinner?
Things The Bean has said:
1. In the past few days we've devised a new approach to weeing in the toilet. As TB is a boy and I'm a girl, we had another adult male help with a discussion of how to direct one's dangle into the toilet bowl to avoid the increasingly loud and frustrated outbursts regarding pee on the toilet floor.
Dig if you will a picture - Me, Will (the adult male in question) and the Jelly Bean standing in a circle in my kitchen. We all have textas in our hands. We are all holding textas out of the zips in our jeans. We are all bent at the knees demonstrating the way in which pee CAN actually arrive in the toilet bowl rather than all over the world.
Some days later, when TB is on the way to the bathroom:
Me: What do you need to do?
TB: To hold my dangle like a texta, Mama.
2. I've had some discussions with the Jelly Bean's kinder teacher lately, and we've recently had him tested for some developmental behaviours. He may need to repeat kinder next year as he is a little behind the standard. A little behind the other kids. I beg to differ in some ways and shout hallelujah in others. I have struggled with this information and may have forced myself in to blogging hiatus while I tried to figure out what it might mean if he has to struggle through his life. But, I digress....
We're sitting on the platform at Flinders' Street Station. The Jelly Bean points to the giant brass, green, iconic domes.
TB: Hey mama, look, it's a mosque.
(I've never been so proud.)
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