A Pause for Raspberry Sherbet

I turned my face away from the pastel magenta explosion coming from the counter and thanked my lucky stars that I actually put on the stupid kitchen apron. It had been a purchase I had long put off but now that I had finally paid out for one I always forgot to put the damn thing on. Luckily, a load of wash was saved and one of my favorite lay-around shirts was spared (only, of course, to be destroyed an hour later by an orange highlighter falling out of my mouth).

I looked down at my raspberry-milk slurry which would soon be churned into raspberry sherbet a la David's recipe, albeit with a bit of orange water and mandarin blossom vodka added. As I poured it into the well chilled bowl I began to think again of how I could utilize Sarah O'Brien's argument that the swamp in Hemingway's Big Two-Hearted River precipitates the eventual "machine in the garden" dilemma of pastoral escape and apply that to the manufactured food Nick eats during his lunch in the story.

Damn, stupid brain. "Stop thinking!" I thought to myself. All I wanted was to make something sweet. Instead my mind kept wandering back to papers I had to write.

With the looming knowledge that my summer vacation would be devoured by endless research, reading, and writing; and my current situation with final papers and thesis proposal, every last square inch of my living room and bedroom were buried in books and papers and notes. More than a few pieces of clothes had been ink stained and Mace was constantly stalking my printer should is show signs of loud ferocity again in it's unending effort to print more sources for me to glean over.

For those curious, my thesis is on the underlying problems in the rhetoric of the slow food movement. By slow food I do, indeed, mean the ACTUAL Slow Food Movement started by Carlo Petrini, but will also discuss a bit of the whole green, organic, local diatribes that people go into. Not to say that I don't agree with what they say, but sometimes the arguments don't take in the whole picture or are a bit too utopian (or in this case Watersian).

Furthermore with finals this year, in order to double up my reading, I ensured that my papers were all food related so I could read books I would could use for my thesis. The ritual of the meal as an indicator of societal values is the paper for my Cultural Studies class, the other on the use of food in Hemingway's novel "Farewell to Arms" and short story "Big Two-Hearted River" as a way to demonstrate the food and eating scenes as a form of escapism and thus a way to psychologically analyze the characters. The irony of the sherbet situation here was I was using food to escape the paper about food as escapism (I wonder if I can work this post in somehow...?).

As you can see I'm drowning in food theory, rhetoric, and psychology. It seems I have laid out my future as a food-focused sociologist of sorts.

But yes, the sherbet. We've gone off topic a bit. I needed to simply escape reading and writing about the blah blah blah of food and actually sit down and make some and eat it. Remind myself why I actually give a damn about it all.

The sherbet was perfect. More than perfect. It was rejuvenating. I picked up some of the books off the couch and plopped down with a ramen bowl of the ice cream. Cid and Mace curled up next to me and I pressed play on the DVD remote to start the Sex and the City DVD start up where I left it. A quick pause in the day to relax and rekindle my fires with a chilly treat, refreshing myself and recalling why all this food study crap is just so much fun.