I want plebian to come back into style with the web elite. I was to start calling people “pleebs” or “pl33bs” or something.

Ketchup on hotdogs is for the Plebians.

I am also a sloppy blogger so some things I said might have come off the wrong way. I don’t deny that there’s a universal, culture-spanning, sense of what dysfunction is, but I also think that the idea of treating those dysfunctions is probably pretty recent. I mean, think of the Middle Ages where everyone had kind of a dysfunctional relationship with God and anyone who wasn’t a noble was essentially a slave.

Still, though it might imply that I am totally pessimistic that I think Schopenhauer is right, I also find something hopeful in believing that not being able to choose my will helps me to do things I might not otherwise do. I am only speaking from my personal point of view, and, as far as the gamut of human desires can run, mine are pretty pedestrian.

I think a lot of humanities greatest accomplishments and darkest moments come from trying to fill the hole that our desires can create. Dysfunctional or otherwise.

Honestly, for most foods it didn’t take much work. Surprisingly, food that I thought I had hated and had avoided, it turned out it tasted just fine if I began with an attitude of wanting to like it instead of wanting not to. Ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, and a few other foods I continued to hate though. Then I started cooking with mustard and decided I liked it in sauces and from there it was easy to like mustard. I did the same thing with ketchup–I make a port wine sauce for pork chops that takes a couple of tablespoons of ketchup and knowing it’s there you can just taste the sweetness and tomato flavor and I really like that in the sauce, which indicated to me that I should be able to like ketchup. It took more work before I was able to get to eat it on something like a hot dog, but I got there.

I tend to have the same gut reaction to being told I cannot do something. In high school an English teacher told me that water is always symbolic of baptism and rebirth and I remember thinking that I wanted to go write a short story where water very clearly did not mean that, just to prove her wrong. I remember, too, an English professor saying that it’s impossible to come up with any hard and fast definition of poetry because the second you tell a bunch of poets that something cannot be poetry, one of them is going to rush out to prove you wrong. It’s one of the things I find appealing about poets.