Primal With A Side Of FABULOUS page 55

[bloodorchid]

are you SURE that chicken was really made of chicken?

[Dragonfly]

hahahahahahahahahaahahahahaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahh ahahahahahahahahhaaaaaahahahhahahahahahahahahhahah ahahahahahahahahhahahahahhahahhahhahahahhahhahahah ahahahahhahahahahhahahahhahahahhahahahahhahhahaha

That is all.

[ItinerantChild]

Oh Panda, i love your stories. Although I can't quite get my head round you not being able to roast a Jean-Cluck. Maybe I am getting old? Strewth, I am getting old! Damn it. I have just realized that I am 52. That is old by anyone's standards.

And then I remember that you have been a veggie for a long time - and chucking chicks clucks into the oven is not your scene.

Mind you, I am crap at cooking. Total crap. And this new Primal thing is challenging my crapedness. I have found one wonderful site that helps me with my lack of cooking skills. www.modernpaleowarfare.com

They bring the sex back into cooking! Give it a bash and see what you think.

[Gay Panda]

Although I can't quite get my head round you not being able to roast a Jean-Cluck.

And then I remember that you have been a veggie for a long time - and chucking chicks clucks into the oven is not your scene.

Mind you, I am crap at cooking. Total crap. And this new Primal thing is challenging my crapedness. I have found one wonderful site that helps me with my lack of cooking skills. Modern Paleo Warfare

Thanks for the site! I will check that out.

I never learned how to cook as a cub and then as a young adult I slid into almost-vegetarianism. It is very easy to live out of a can and rice steamer as an almost-vegetarian. Occasionally, I bought ready-made meats from the store, or would get a steak in a restaurant. So that is how I have lived this long before learning how to roast a Jean-Cluck Picard. It is a little embarrassing.

[geostump]

Thanks for the site! I will check that out.

I never learned how to cook as a cub and then as a young adult I slid into almost-vegetarianism. It is very easy to live out of a can and rice steamer as an almost-vegetarian. Occasionally, I bought ready-made meats from the store, or would get a steak in a restaurant. So that is how I have lived this long before learning how to roast a Jean-Cluck Picard. It is a little embarrassing.

I was cooking at 13. Making a lot of SAD but I learned how to cook. Much of it was self taught. I hated Home Ec in school so after junior high, I just started reading cookbooks and taught myself to cook. Since the males weren't interested in me, that is what I did with my free time.

[Gay Panda]

I was cooking at 13. Making a lot of SAD but I learned how to cook. Much of it was self taught. I hated Home Ec in school so after junior high, I just started reading cookbooks and taught myself to cook. Since the males weren't interested in me, that is what I did with my free time.

By 13, I could no longer take the tension at the Panda Family table, so I would take my meals to my bedroom and eat there alone. I did that 364 days a year, the exception being Thanksgiving when we faked a happy family face for my visiting grandmother.

Cooking was always a mysterious process in my eyes, and it did not once occur to me to get a cookbook out of the library until I was an adult. I applaud you for your youthful initiative! I just avoided the whole thing.

[hockeyfan7]

Love your journal! You could consider Donner Street named after one of Santa's reindeer and consider that reindeer meat would be tasty and good for you. My 4 year old thinks pork chops are reindeer meat and I see no need to persuade him otherwise. Around last Christmas I asked him what he wanted for dinner and he said reindeer. So I told him the pork chops were reindeer meat and he's called pork that ever since. He eats it so I am good with it.

[geostump]

By 13, I could no longer take the tension at the Panda Family table, so I would take my meals to my bedroom and eat there alone. I did that 364 days a year, the exception being Thanksgiving when we faked a happy family face for my visiting grandmother.

Cooking was always a mysterious process in my eyes, and it did not once occur to me to get a cookbook out of the library until I was an adult. I applaud you for your youthful initiative! I just avoided the whole thing.

At that point, it was just my mom and I and she stopped cooking entirely. I had to pick up the slack somewhere.

[Gay Panda]

Love your journal! You could consider Donner Street named after one of Santa's reindeer and consider that reindeer meat would be tasty and good for you. My 4 year old thinks pork chops are reindeer meat and I see no need to persuade him otherwise.

What a cheerful way of looking at Donner Street! I was too swift to go to the macabre. But in my defense, there is also a cemetery on that same road as my CSA. Just classic.

[Gay Panda]

PART ONE: Today I woke up thinking about failed messages.

When I was a cub of seven, the Panda Family went to a carnival. I played a game where one sprays a hose at a target that fills a balloon, and if you are the first to make your balloon pop, you win a stuffed animal chock full of toxic flame-retardants. My balloon popped first and I was awarded a fat stuffed sheep, who I determined would be my new best friend, while it determined to poison me slowly.

On the drive home, I clutched the sheep to my chest and worked on how it would fit into my stuffed family. Each had a name and rank, quarterly report cards if they were young and work evaluations if they were older. They had friends and sworn enemies, some were heroes and others were villains, and I was convinced that they came alive at night. Engaging in glorious battles and pagan dances, they stormed the floor of my bedroom and somehow always, always managed to freeze the second I woke up to peep over the top bunk bed. It was very frustrating, but I was sure I would catch them in time.

I had one other stuffed sheep, an anemic creature with wobbly legs that would not hold him up, and as I pondered the relationship between that one and this new one, Father Panda apropos of nothing, said, “Young Panda, if you grow up and marry a black, Hispanic, or Asian, you will be disowned. Do you know what that means?”

Marriage is not a very interesting topic in the world of a seven-year-old. I was more concerned with my new stuffed animal, if its basic nature was good or bad, how it would relate to my main antagonist Mean Kitty*, if its first report card would show brilliance or stupidity. I hugged my sheep closer, more interested in finding the right name, and the sheep snuggled closer to me, more interested in giving me cancer. “No, Father.”

“Disowned means that Mommy and Daddy will never speak to you again. If you marry a black, Hispanic, or Asian, we will never, ever talk to you, and you can’t come home to visit.”
“Not even for Christmas?” I asked, absolutely baffled.
“No,” Father Panda said. “You won’t get any presents at all, and we’ll pretend that you don’t exist.” You might think that this was the point that Valhalla giggled and made me gay as a karmic bitch-slap to Father Panda. But I’ve known that I was gay since preschool, even if I didn’t know the word, and didn’t connect the word once I did know it to myself until I was 17.

I hugged squishy Cancer Sheep even tighter as I pondered Father Panda’s words. I went to a school with every shade of skin, no value was attached to the color you happened to be, and there were few incidents of any kind based on race or country-of-origin**. We had small differences, some kids were bilingual, some had different foods in their lunches, but mostly we were the same. We loved recess and Pizza Day. We were scared of the substitute teacher Mrs. Fright Night. We all wanted to play the chimes in music. Our insults concerned intelligence levels, scent, and nose picking, not skin color.

In order to demonize a group, it has to be seen as separate from your own. But my world was a racially diverse and sheltered private school where value was determined by how fast a person ran at recess, not the color of the legs doing so. Since race did not define us at school or church, or anywhere else in my life, I could not make sense of what Father Panda said. I tucked it away in my mental file of bewildering things to mull over and returned to playing with Cancer Sheep.