Soy Sauce Packets & Epiphanies: A Letter from Australia.

one of the most prominent blogs in my google reader on a daily basis is the stranger's daily blog entitled slog. i follow it for many reasons, one being items like this one. they've been receiving and posting letters from people all over the world regarding the elections today. it began as americans overseas, but quickly spread to citizens of other countries as well. i encourage you, if you need to get away from the typical election anxiety of today, check out slog HERE, where you can see many more of these letters. they are posting them constantly as they receive them, so if they interest you, as they do me, check back often. and please don't forget to VOTE.

Alas, I am not an American citizen. If I were, I'd be able to cast an absentee ballot from my home in Brisbane, Australia and vote for Barack Obama.
Like every other country in the world (including, I'm delighted to say, the USA), Australia is overwhelmingly behind Obama.

Why do we care so much? Why have I followed every sling and arrow of Barack's outrageous fortune over the last 2 years with excitement and hope? Why have I invested more time and emotional energy in your election than in my own? Because your President affects our lives more profoundly than anyone living in the USA can imagine.

I ask you to imagine for a minute, leaving domestic issues aside for a minute, what a different place the world might be today if Al Gore had won in 2000. How many of those who have died in the last 8 years might still be alive today? How might the plight of the world's poorest and underprivileged have been improved? How many voices, silenced or overborne by Bush's foreign policy priorities, might have been heard? How might the middle east look now? Iraq? How might democratic progress in Iran have played out if Bush's aggressive policies not scared the voting population into electing Ahmadinejad? How fearful might we be today about Al Qaeda and the threat of terrorism? How might the pace of climate change in the world have been slowed?

Thank you America for voting for Obama. The world is going to change tomorrow. And I, for one, can't wait...

[via slog]

the story behind ssp&e:

so i'm not sure if you're anything like me, but being the 'off the cuff cuisine' chef that i am, i try not to let anything go to waste. you know, when you bring home some bk or mickey d's, and after consuming your poor excuse for food, have ketchup packets or sauce shots left over that you throw in the door and forget about. same goes for chinese food, and you know they always give you enough sauce to put out a fire at the pentagon with your order. you throw them in your refrigerator door and forget about them. then one day you're trying to impress some last minute guests that have decided to stay at your place for dinner and all you have in your 'gourmet' kitchen are some ramen noodles, frozen veggies and some leftover grilled chicken from last weekend's cookout. the makings of a superb, on-the-fly stirfry. but wait, OH SHIT!, how are you going to make a sauce for your stirfry with no sauce? you look in the fridge and all you see is a bottle of ketchup, french's mustard (i use the term mustard loosely when describing french's), and a jar of pickle juice. oh no, what to do, what to do. then you bust open the butter holder, that invariably has never seen a stick of butter in it's life, and VOILA! soy sauce, duck sauce, hot mustard! packets, but instant chinkychow sauce nonetheless! each one of those packets, collected over time, came from a meal, inevitably eaten over conversation, an argument or during a lone lunch of self-reflection, came from a time and place in the past. as are our lessons learned. we learn through the years how to cope, how to inspire, how to teach, and how to live. we don't always remember those lessons, as we throw condiment packets in the fridge we throw life-lessons into the back of our heads, until one day we find ourself in a situation where it becomes relevant and we pull them from the back of our minds as to not waste the advice and lessons of the past. the moral of this story, and the linking of it to my blog- our life experiences are our 'soy sauce packets,' our hidden links to our experiences of our past...

e·piph·a·ny - noun - a sudden, intuitive perception of or insight into the reality or essential meaning of something, usually initiated by some simple, homely, or commonplace occurrence or experience. [www.dictionary.com]

the epiphanies that we experience in life, questions or situations that we find ourselves in, and don't know how to resolve, can most often be solved my raking our brains in search of a 'soy sauce packet.' an answer to a question. a solution to a problem. and so this, this blog, is simply an ever-expanding culmination of soy sauce packets in my butter box, and the epiphanies that have helped to make room for more butter in my fridge...

Soy Sauce Packets & Epiphanies

Linkbar

A Letter from Australia.

Tuesday, November 04, 2008

0 comments:

Post a Comment

About butter:

the story behind ssp&e:

from the churn:

more ssp&e:

where it all began:

Copyright Fair Use Notice:

Our Blogger Templates Web Design