Now it can be told: I have officially sealed my fate as the office eccentric. This morning I had planned to marinate the skirt steaks I bought for dinner (plus leftovers) in a mix of lime juice, garlic, salt and adobo seasoning. Lo and behold, there was no garlic or lime juice in the house. A normal person would have just settled on another marinade, but...oh, heck, do I even need to give you the punchline?
Reader, I took the damn steaks to work, along with the adobo seasoning and salt, as well as a freezer bag to hold everything. On the way I stopped at Grand Central Market and bought a dozen limes and a head of garlic. At the first allowable break in la Marche Futile, I sneaked into the cafeteria, squeezed the lime juice into the bag, crushed a few cloves of garlic and threw them in, shook in a little salt and a lot of adobo, and dropped in the steaks, which looked nice and tiny in the meat case at Whole Foods but turned out to be eighteen inches long each. (Note to self: For the love of Bog, please buy yourself a copy of Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery.) I sealed the bag, mooshed everything together and was about to put it in the fridge when I realized that the steaks, already starting to turn dark from exposure to lime juice, looked like an enormous discolored heart. I decided that if I kept it in my shoulder bag, it should stay pretty cool (and it did), so I carried back to my desk, half-wedged in the crook of my elbow, hoping all the way that nobody would catch me carrying my bag of raw meat.
I suspect I am not long for Cubicle World.
To prepare for my eventual exile, I decided to put my Research Girl cap back on, and thus it is that I find myself reading Sidney Mintz's 1985 study Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. Since lately I take my comfort anywhere I can find it, I find this paragraph from the introduction very comforting, and helpful in reminding me that no matter how dire our immediate past and future is, it still behooves us to keep an eye on the larger picture:
Though I do not accept uncritically the dictum that anthropology must become history or be nothing at all, I believe that without history its explanatory power is seriously compromised. Social phenomena are by their nature historical, which is to say that the relationships among events in one "moment" can never be abstracted from their past and future setting. Arguments about immanent human nature, about the human being's inbuilt capacity to endow the world with its characteristic structures, are not necessarily wrong; but when these arguments replace or obviate history, they are inadequate and misleading. Human beings do create social structures, and do endow events with meaning; but these structures and meanings have historical origins that shape, limit and help to explain such creativity.
Incidentally, the skirt steak, while a bit fatty, was pretty tasty, especially when served up with butter lettuce leaves and Pickapeppa sauce for dipping.
And just because a) I'm in the mood for sharing a corny joke and b) I just heard it on the teevee, I shall share with you one of my favorite exchanges from Futurama:
Fry: You mean the secret ingredient of Slurm is...people?
Leela: No, you're thinking of Soylent Cola.
Fry: Oh. How is it?
Leela: It varies from person to person.
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Pickapeppa sauce??