I made the mistake of feeding the tots peanut butter & jelly sandwiches for lunch today. C gleefully proceeds to peel her bread apart to scoop out the jelly with her fingers. She spreads the strawberry jelly all over face like war paint and shoots her little brown eyed glares at me when I ask her what the heck she is doing. I let this go on for about 15 minutes before before giving up on the prospect of her actually ingesting any morsel of food, and start wiping her sticky little fingers while she squirms and yells “nooooo!!” at me. Once free from this high chair, she runs out of the kitchen squealing something about “bababababaaa” and I start cleaning up. Not 2 minutes later, she comes back and start pounding on the panty and grunting, which is baby language for “may I please have something to eat.” So I’m like arraghh oh my god, fine, and give her some peanut butter crackers and tell her to go sit down at the small table. She obliges and by now my lunch of asparagus and potato wedges are ready. I sit down and start eating and that little piglet perks up at the sight of my plate – just my plate without even seeing what was on it- and makes a beeline straight for me. Drops her crackers on the floor and pulverizes them with her feet as she trots her way across the room as fast as she can. She says “ahmm? ahmmm?” and looks at me curiously, head cocked to the side. No way, I tell her, you just had your chance and did nothing but play with your food. Must not be hungry, eh? But nope, now she’s sticking her grubby little paws into my asparagus. What the hell…ok,I think. You can have asparagus. It’s healthy and I can’t complain. I let her take a stalk and she sticks it in her mouth, swirls it around a little, then gingerly hands this saliva/ snot covered (yeah, she’s oozing) piece of asparagus back to me. She ended up doing the same thing with a potato wedge and tried to repeat the process via grunting and pointing at the same food she had just finished oozing on and handing back.
I wish people talked less about their opinions and beliefs and more about why they hold those opinions/beliefs. What people tend to do is disengage from someone as soon as they state or hold an opinion differing from their own. You make judgements and suppositions about another person’s entire existence based solely on an opinion. One topic. The funny thing about me is I really don’t care about what a person’s opinion on a particular topic is; I just want to understand their thought process. It’s much more interesting to gain insight into what sorts of thoughts go through one’s mind, or what experiences they’ve had that played a role in developing an opinion. Just out of curiosity, and just to understand. I won’t pretend that I have significant influence on the views of others. People think whatever they want to think, regardless.
Problem is, when you ask the question ‘Why?’ people get pissed off and defensive. Either that or they just don’t have an answer why. They haven’t thought about it before and get annoyed when you try to make them. They think you’re attacking them. But that’s not how I see it. I think if someone asks you why, it means they’re genuinely interested in you and what you have to say. If they don’t, they’re not. It’s simple. Depressing thing is, I honestly can’t recall the last time someone asked me why or attempted to understand more about me. Instead, the conversation usually goes like this. “Oh you think xxx? Well actually yyy and blah blah blah you’re wrong I’m right.” People thinking of what they’re going to say next rather than even pretending to finish listening to what you’re saying.
I often wonder about which people I know – people who seemingly like me – would change their mind about me if they found out I was an atheist, or that I have strongly liberal political views, or any number of other things. Sometimes I wish the opportunity would come up for me to “come out” to certain individuals on certain topics, just to see their reaction and how fast they disassociate. That’s the pessimist in me speaking. Perhaps some would say, “Oh cool, so how come you say that?” and we could actually have a conversation.
Whatever though. It doesn’t matter. I don’t really have a point right now. I’m tired and feeling like I need to get my blog updated more often than once per year since, you know, I’m paying for a host and all that jazz. Hopefully the tots will do something funny tomorrow and I can write about that instead.
