Insight from a college prof
The following is from Mike, a friend of mine, that was sent to a number of people at the University of Washington.
I thought it a delightful little piece…
“So, I’m in my kitchen making French onion soup and listening to the Drive-By Truckers (and how many people can say that?), and I suddenly realize that I can’t find the homemade beef stock I had made several weeks before, after rummaging through the freezer.
So I was ready to make do with store-bought stock (albeit store-bought free-range organic and university-educated beef stock to assuage my guilt), when all of a sudden the Truckers “Easy On Yourself” came on (“Don’t be so easy on yourself/’Cause this one might be all that you have left”), and while I don’t think the Truckers were thinking of decrying giving up too easily on one’s immediate culinary dreams (it’s about being stuck in a brutal Southern town), I thought that perhaps the fact that I was making the soup to fulfill the passionately requested desires of the woman I love might at least get me in the same ballpark, if that ballpark was the size of the Olympic peninsula.
In any event, I went back to the freezer and starting digging in earnest. I mean, I went deep, I went places that had long since given up hope of any future human contact—and then I started making some important discoveries. Like, what was that container with the weird neon orange color that smelled, just, well, strange? And how did I end up with so much pork? Shoulder, chops, loin…some of dubious worth, and probably way too much porcine product for a Jewish guy from Brooklyn.* And generally, why did I have far, far too many items than I really needed? And look, beneath all of it, there was the beef stock.
And then I thought (and I know some of you are way ahead of me on this)…Obama! Just like me, I’ve heard that our President has experienced a rather nasty surprise that diminished his expectations of the possible. (Something to do with Massachusetts, I hear—apparently, for the first time since 1952, the voters of Massachusetts didn’t select a “Kennedy” even though one was on the ballot—I haven’t been paying much attention, honestly.)
What I’m saying, Mr. President, is maybe you should dig deep, look into that metaphoric freezer, and if you find something that looks weird and smells funny, you might want to get rid of it (I’m not naming names, but if you start with “Laurence” and end with “Summers” you might have something); and if you find yourself with way more stuff then you need (say over 1,000 pages), you might want to toss some of that pork and get down to what matters. And if you look deeply enough (you know, down there at the base), you just might find what you need.
What I’m saying, Mr. President is this—don’t be so easy on yourself.”
*Mr. Goldberg is actually a Jewish guy from Springfield, Mass., but that wouldn’t be very funny, would it?