My mood is disturbed and sad.
I was at the gym early this morning and the TV news had the story about the Barnard College student who was murdered last night and I started to cry. Luckily no one saw me.
Actually, I admire men who can cry, especially those who can do so in public. It's a mark of extremely strong character.
_____
I'm here in Mexico in my husband's family's home wondering why I'm here. My 89-year-old father-in-law doesn't know we're married and often forgets the multiple times my husband and I hosted his vacations in the USA, his sister and her two children (one, a male, 25, and one, a female, 16) sometimes seem to think I'm just an open wallet, and the lack of sanitation in this house is utterly appalling.
I think that last is the worst.
The last time I was here, two years ago, the then 14-year-old put raw steak in a pan with her bare hands and
licked her fingers afterward to clean them--after "preparing" the steak by
placing it directly on the unwashed tile countertop to season it. (We saw the finger-licking and asked about the seasoning. She still doesn't understand what she did wrong--or why we didn't want to eat the steak.)
This time, the now 25-year-old handled raw chicken and touched every other damn thing in the kitchen without washing his hands during or after cooking, including (1) our plates, (2) our eating utensils, (3) the napkins we were to use, (4) the countertop surfaces next to the freshly washed dishes, (5) the containers of spices and oils used to cook the chicken, (6) the handles of the pots, (7) the cloth potholders, (8) the food stirrers, and (9) the sink spigots. (He protested that he'd never learned to wash his hands frequently while handling raw meat. Okay. Look again at his age. In another two months he'll be a
college graduate let loose on the unsuspecting world.)
TL;DR: She thinks she's going to be a pharmacobiologist and he thinks he's going to be a chemical engineer. But both have no clue how to maintain food safety
in their own damn kitchen.
It'd be hysterically laughable if it weren't so damned sad. What the hell is wrong with people that they can't understand how to protect themselves and their guests from food-borne illnesses?
[takes a deep breath] . . . . I suppose my husband and I will have to offer to cook every single damned meal while we're here if we don't want to experience some godawful stomach or intestinal disorder--or worse, pick up some parasite that will fuck us up royally before succumbing to some exotic drug cocktail more often used in either the Congo or the Amazon.
/rant over
NCbear (who after just three days with these children is finding it somewhat difficult not to laugh scornfully in their faces when they talk about their future careers--the first is flunking four out of seven of her high school courses [with zeroes on her final exams in those subjects, by the way, which in this country is difficult to achieve unless you answer
absolutely nothing on your exam paper], and the second made Cs and Ds as his
highest grades throughout his underfunded regional college's engineering coursework)
