Hot Dogs Get Godwin'd: An Only Slightly Exaggerated Paraphrasing.

So in this post I talked about a highly ridiculous Nazi Hot Dog post.

Here is the Cliff Notes version of how that went:

Note: As un-grammatical and mis-spelled as this may be, pretend it is more so.

Thread title: What type of hotdogs do you serve your kids?

 Original Post: Hello epicurean friends! My kids really love hotdogs (what kid doesn’t? lol) but I was watching Some Random News/Talk Show and they had a piece on processed meats that made me a little concerned. I’d like to try to find a healthier type of hotdog. Does anyone have any recommendations?

 Comment 1: We really like Applegate Farms. They use grass fed meat and fewer preservatives. A little more expensive, but worth it in my opinion.

 Comment 2: We actually don’t do hotdogs but since this thread is about hotdogs I thought I’d just mention that cutting them in quarters is really important if you’re feeding them to kids younger than 3. They can be a pretty big choking hazard.

 Comment 3: Honestly, we just go with good ol’ Oscar Meyer. I grew up on them and I’m just fine. Plus, we’re on a tight budget. I think a lot of times Some Random News/Talk Show creates a lot of smoke when there’s no fire. Everything in moderation, right? Good luck with whatever you decide!

 OP: Thanks, everyone. I appreciate the reminder on choking hazards and everything in moderation. I’ll check into Applegate farms.

::: fast forward 142 comments :::

 Comment 143: You know what? SMH. I’m just plain sick of the level of ignorance in this thread. Do you know how many chemicals are in hotdogs? A LOT. They’re like 95% chemical. The animals are raised under appalling conditions and the processing plants are health hazards that routinely grind off the workers’ appendages. And you’re totally cool with stuffing your kids full of that because it’s cheap and that’s what your parents did. So if your parents dug up 40’s from the dumpster and put them in your sippy cups as a kid you’re going to do that too? You’re not people, you’re sheeple. Bah-bah-bah. I feel sorry for your children.

 Comment 144: Oh FFS, you high and mighty know it all. You can drive around in your hybrid Mercedes preaching to people and turning your nose up at hotdogs all you want. I live in the real world where people have budgets. Excuse me if I can’t feed my kid Organic Truffle Tofu Pate Dogs or whatever the hell you feed your kid. If hotdogs were really that dangerous the USDA would ban them. People have eaten hotdogs for decades and they’re fine. smh.

 Comment 145: Yes. They’re all fine. Cancer didn’t happen. Childhood obesity didn’t happen. Gross labor violations didn’t happen. You probably also think the Holocaust didn’t happen.  Your level of denial is incredible.

 Comment 146: Oh please, you’re just like Hitler. A hotdog Nazi invading everyone’s lives forcing them to feed their kids food-Nazi-approved food only.

You start off with a perfectly cordial, coherent question and if you go on long enough the issue becomes One of Great Importance. Sure, there’s stuff like global warming, genocide re-emerging in the South Sudan, and one in five kids in the US living in poverty. But do you know what’s really important – worthy of harsh rhetoric and metaphorical lines in the e-sand? – HOTDOGS.

June Cleaver, Fear, and Nazi Hot Dogs.

I’m in charge of most of the domestic stuff in our household. For right now it makes sense. I’m not entirely comfortable with this arrangement because at times I feel pigeon holed into a June Cleaver / Martha Stewart type place where there’s something weird about me if I’m not super into glue guns, cake decorating, rom-coms, and freaking out about all the products and seemingly innocent shenanigans that the news constantly informs us can KILL OUR CHILDREN.

 Not that there’s anything wrong with glue guns, cake decorating, or rom-coms or people who like them. Just like there’s nothing wrong with taxidermy, ice hockey, or Star Trek conventions or people who like them. They’re all good people; I like the people. It’s just that when people try to relate to me by talking about any of those topics I'm lost within five minutes, have trouble following, and just end up nodding politely and feeling uncomfortable.

To my husband’s credit, he’s not generally a dick about the domestic situation. He doesn’t act like he’s Mr. Sensitive, Foe of Sexism Everywhere because he did the dishes. He’s a nice guy. With good survival instincts.

The domestic-y thing I enjoy doing the most is cooking. You can geek out on cooking in a way you can’t really geek out on, say, vacuuming. With cooking there’s all kinds of chemistry-esk aspects to it. You can find out about the environmental and health impacts of various aspects of food production and apply that to your culinary habits. You can learn the history of recipes, try out new techniques, and improvise. And you can integrate all that into a meal. It’s an entertaining way to make the most of being the family accountant, nutritionist, and chef.

With vacuuming you’re kind of just standing there vacuuming.

So since I’m more into cooking right now my g reader is loaded down with foodie blogs and cooking sites.

Lately, even when contemplating ground turkey and the foodie-verse, I’ve pretty consistently had bouncing around the back of my mind thoughts about level headedness, civility, and the hyperbolic nature of so many debates. Possibly because of the Mommy Wars. Possibly because it’s primary season and the attack ads and general temperature of the political rhetoric make it seem like we’re on the brink of civil war. Like there’s this group of Americans who wake up every morning and think, “Hey. You know what would be awesome? Total destruction of all our values and traditions coupled with economic devastation and lax national security! I’m gonna shoot for that.” Like the country is one big battlefield where you’ve got to exercise constant vigilance because the enemy could be RIGHT AROUND THE CORNER. Possibly right next to that one product that CNN and the Today Show have just discovered will KILL YOUR CHILDREN.

So I’m hanging out in my kitchen, musing about this and I come across a forum with a discussion about hot dogs that devolves to point where there’s a Nazi reference. (If I have the time and inclination later tonight Iwill paraphrase the Nazi Hot Dog thread because, really, it should be sharedwith people who are not members of that forum for it’s ridiculousness to berecognized in all it’s glory.)

Nazi Hot Dogs are a part of my day now. And that makes me wonder just how contagious divisive rhetoric and fear mongering really are. I’m a mom making dinner for her family – something almost nauseatingly chock full of gentle wholesomeness and family values – and within that placid context I’m confronted with a Nazi metaphor and I'm not even all that surprised by it.

Rancor seems pretty viral.

I wonder if June Cleaver and Martha Stewart were so regularly bombarded with Hitler metaphors, warnings about how everything will KILL YOUR CHILDREN, and suggestions that their neighbors weren’t really their neighbors so much as nefarious anti-American agitators as evidenced by the fact that they would stoop so low as to vote for a different candidate than the one they would have picked.

USA! USA! USA!

Mommy Wars and Being a Jerk on the Internet.

I am a parent of a young child and as such am interested in topics related to parenting young children. Interested is perhaps the wrong word. I’m practical. I have a kid. I love my kid. I want her to have a good childhood. I could feed my kid microwave popcorn while researching my fantasy football league, reading “The Economist,” and watching “The Walking Dead” and just cart her off to her bedroom at whatever time I happen to notice she’s passed out on the floor. But that’s terrible parenting. So I put those things on hold when my kid is around and try to be on top of and informed about parenting stuff like cooking, bed times, laundry, and Dora.

So the mommy blogosphere is well represented in my g reader and it’s a whole different beast from the other spheres of content I have in there.

The mommy blogosphere is a place where it’s easy to forget one of life’s great truths: It’s not okay to act like a dick.

There are the Mommy Wars. In a way, they make sense. Everybody feels passionately about their children so there’s this undercurrent of strong feeling that can be easily tapped into and has the potential to explode at any time whether you’re talking about kid friendly cooking or birthday parties that just isn’t there if you’re talking about iPhones or gardens.

There’s so much passion, commitment, and different sleep deprived personalities all roiling around these issues that ultimately - given that there exists famine, disease, war, and all manner of other heart stoppingly grave issues – in and of themselves are not actually go-to-the-mat-life-definingly important. But since parenting as a whole is so important people get swept up in the details, emotions run high, and all of a sudden you find yourself reading a heated yet heartfelt testimonial / mission statement on the life altering horrors of plastic sippy cups complete with barbed personal insults aimed at the evil doers who comprise the pro-sippy cup opposition.

The standard responses to this type of Mommy War jerkiness seem to be either a) Hey whiner: put on your Big Girl Panties. If you can’t stand the flames get off the internet. Let me proceed to “tell it like it is” by which I mean “use none of the basic politeness or self-control I employ routinely and without thinking in my offline life” or b) Yes! Down with jerks! Those mean girls always say mean things and we’re not mean. We show love and support. That’s what everyone should do all the time no matter what. So if someone writes about how Jenny McCarthy’s book on curing autism is super-great science I’m not going to disagree because disagreeing is mean.

Neither of these responses are at all satisfying to me. I don’t want to e-walk around pretending like I’m totally cool with personal insults, cheap shots, and general vitriol being lobbed around or tell people who are upset that it’s wrong to feel that way and they just need bigger underpants. I also don’t want to refrain from expressing my opinion that Jenny McCarthy’s books do not contain anything resembling super-great science because saying so isn’t “supportive” or “nice.” I can have issues with the super-greatness of the science in the book without being insulting or destructive towards the person who likes the book. I also don't want to write about topics that are so obvious or boring that everybody always agrees about them.

The frequency with which passion erupts in the form of jerkiness in the mommy blogosphere makes me reluctant to participate in it. But mainly I don’t want to get trapped in a perspective suck and wake up one day and realize that even though I’m aware there’s genocide re-emerging in the South Sudan what really riles me up to the point of published unrestrained dickish-ness is whether or not some kid I don’t know is allowed to watch unlimited TV.

What’s your impression of the Mommy Wars? What say you re: jerkiness and the internet?

Shaking Things Up.

One of my three year old daughter’s favorite phrases right now is “shake things up.” Like she’ll come out of her bedroom carrying a wand and wearing mismatched socks and a necklace as a Bjorn Borg style headband and be like, “Look! When I was getting dressed I decided to ::: wiggles hips and throws arms up in the air triumphantly ::: Shake things up!”

I think I need to ::: wiggle ::: shake things up! too. Not necessarily by way of retro Swedish hairdos and princess accessories but, you know, metaphorically speaking. In my regular clothes.

It's not that I'm bored or don't have anything else to do. And if I'm having an existential crisis it's so low intensity that I forget about it sometimes which has got to mean that it's a "crisis" in the same sense that Kim Kardashian is an "actor." It's just that I've got this irritatingly amorphous desire to add some more... something? to my life. Or do other... stuff? Or sort out issues surrounding... that one thing? I want to ::: wiggle ::: shake things up! But I don't really know which things to shake. (And, no, I don't mean that in a dirty way, you gutter-snipe.)

So I started writing. Writing, for me, is a good way to clarify my thoughts mainly because I compulsively keep re-thinking and re-writing until I can put down a sentence that is not a waste of space. I could, for instance, write, "I want to do more stuff that's awesome and less stuff that sucks." But then I would get irritated by that sentence because, really, isn't that true for everyone ever always? No one is like, "You know what I hate? Awesome stuff. I'm gonna do less of that and focus on sucking." So I would have to re-think and re-write until I had a sentence that was clear enough to be useful.

Why put any of this up on the Internet especially since rambling, niche-free personal blogs can bore the pants off people? The short answer is accountability; I will be way more likely to write if there's even a slight chance that someone will notice. The longer answer (as an introspective and somewhat verbose individual I always have a longer answer) is that I'm hoping that rambling will eventually bring focus and possibly lead to a niche. I can hone in on what I really want to think and write about and take it from there.

So who knows? Maybe this is the first post of a mommy blog. Or a food blog. Or a political blog. Or a green blog. Or a blog about collecting those marionette style puppets that look like they walked straight out of a Stephen King novel and I don't even know what they're called yet because I have not yet discovered that the only things I really needed to add to life to satisfy my creative and intellectual curiosity were super creepy puppets.

Probably not that last thing.

The point is that maybe in due course I can join some larger e-conversation sphere and that could be interesting. And even if that doesn't happen writing again in a non-academic setting feels good. So the first goal of this blog will be gaining some kind of clarity of topic through writing within a framework that entails some kind of accountability.

Good times. And thanks for reading this.