at home, sippin on some sizurp... er, pinot... eating the lovely gouda that gregor gave us, perusing the new york times. it's really disturbing to me to see that every single day, this country makes the headlines, usually related to some contamination headline, or poisoning headline, or something. it really makes me wonder. every other country on the planet wants to get into this market, but when the suppliers here are only concerned with making money - not avoiding killing people, not avoiding poisoning people - and the infrastructure is such where such a dogma is able to flourish... what's going to happen? this country will continue to come in the lowest on the cost scale so countries all over the world will continue to buy exports, but will these companies just start implementing rigorous checks, or will this culture actually change? will the widely-drawn belief that cutting corners by substituting wheat gluten with diethylene glycol or fill-in-the-blank chemical substitution actually be phased out? can a people be changed?
i mean, they must. it must. i'm sure it's happened hundreds of times in history, in civilizations long gone. but being here and witnessing firsthand the pervasiveness of this money-saving, life-devaluing mentality really makes me wonder. cyn and i were barreling through this intersection in a cab the other night and a woman on a scooter who was riding through a red light into the intersection just kept going, directly into our cab. she was going about 5.3 mph and we screeched on our brakes and swerved to miss her (which we did), and she didn't trip. didn't bat a fucking eyelash. this happens daily. hourly. minutely. i've seen bicycles go head to head with buses and trucks and almost die, and the riders just look at each other and laugh merrily. i'm not talking about missing by a mile, either. inches. millimeters. i don't get it, but then again, i do. we theorize that life just doesn't have the value here that it has in the states. not hard to believe when reading it written on some random, half-nonsensical blog, but hard to believe when it stares you in the face and you see the buttons on the blouse of a woman you could've killed but didn't but it doesn't matter because she doesn't seemed to have noticed...
covered in mosquito bites from some time yesterday. one mosquito must've seen my big purple bruises from the pole-dancing class and honed in, because i have this golf ball-sized mosquito lump amongst my bruises. multiples on my ankles. disgusting.
what else is going on... what else...
sometimes i wonder if i could ever be a tai tai, and just do nothing all day while my husband works full-time and supports me. i see all these women at the yoga studio in the middle of the day that clearly are not working full-time, if at all, and i wonder if i could do that with a clear conscience. i guess ideally the dude i end up marrying will be a real stand-up type and i'd trust him with my life and all that crap, but from my perspective here and now, there's no one that i'd trust with that except for me. which is why now i don't think that could ever happen. sure, when you get hitched you ideally believe that this is your other half, this is the one person that knows you inside and out and will support you when you need supporting in whatever capacity. but there's that maligned notion that a fiscal supporting of a spouse is worth far more than the other stuff that goes on. i'm guilty of that thought, myself, so i'm not judging or casting stones. financial support is just so much more documentable, i suppose.
carolyn blabbering. blabbering, blabbering...
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