I thought I would write another musing while on this final plane ride for the week. I finished my book and this is a chance to get some words down. I am not going to write about goals, motivation or food and I think we are all a bit tired of hearing me commit and fail or pontificate about way I should be or want to be or whatever rat hole I slip into. Last night I had a really interesting conversation because it made me realize that all this pontification is really only a pretense of me trying to believe I know myself.
Six of us went out to dinner, four people from the customer team, a coworker and me. The big boss is French, a genuine guy, which is generally very interesting to talk to about almost anything. The day had been a little brutal as they had spent most of it grilling me and talking about all the things my company does and is currently doing wrong. It had been a tough couple of months for this customer and they had quite a bit of frustration that they wanted to share. It had been rough but we all managed to keep it business and not personal. On breaks, we laughed and chatted and then went back into the boxing ring when the meeting resumed. It is not super easy for me to keep from getting too defensive and lash out, but taking the beatings with grace is what I get paid to do.
Anyway ... They want to go to dinner and they started it off wrong for me by saying we were going to a nice quite steakhouse that was a very good restaurant and would not be one of these loud generic places that were littered all over the area. It sounded great to me, a nice meal, and a nice glass of wine - perfect way to end the stressful day. I knew the conversation would flow well because we had been more than able to communicate in the worst of times.
Where did we go? A typical chain steakhouse with dead animals all over the walls, loud, terrible service, no wine selection and a fairly generic menu. BOOO!!! I adjusted but I was damn disappointed but I will admit that my quality of my filet was very good.
As expected we chit chatted with the greatest of ease about wine, books, where they lived, and the conversation turned to food. It turned out the big boss had strong opinions about loving food and wanting others to love it too - maybe it is a French thing? It started because two of his guys ordered their steak medium, which was a crime against the meat in his opinion - I actually agree with him. I am not clear how the conversation turned but he began to list of all the meats he likes to eat or has ever eaten. We talked about the easy ones duck, liver, ostrich, boar, deer and then started getting more off beat like bear, tongue, horse, intestines, cheeks and it went on and on. We talked about fish and oysters snake and dog and he was pulling out pictures and talking about recipes - the man loves his food. About half the table was adventurous with food and the other half was very conservative so it made for interesting dialog and dynamics.
We started down a path of texture and how that is a big killer for a lot of foods and everyone has different textures that just do not work for them. Sweetbread, Mushrooms, bone marrow, oysters and sea urchins were used as examples of foods with "texture issues." One of his guys was talking about how everyone has their line of something they would not consider eating - what was considered acceptable to even try to eat. He was actually not a very adventurous eater but some how started with he would never eat eyeballs - that to him was crossing the line. As we talked further his line was actually much further back - raw fish, oysters, kidney, liver - but we all knew what he meant and we knew we all had our own line. Except maybe for the big boss who could not think of anything other than dog that would cross his line. One of the people was from china and lived in Singapore and told us as well as she could about the strange oddities in China and she would eat most things. Interesting but her line was really alcohol. She had only ever tasted alcohol and would never drink it again - she did not like the taste or the affect that she felt so it was knocked off the list. The irony was all of us telling her that if she drank more and kept at it she would like it more but no one stood up for bone marrow or oysters with the same fervor.
One of the coworkers joked that he never wanted to be in a plane crash because he was sure his boss would eat him. Which sparked the boss to tell the story about how he had heard one of the survivors of the rugby players plane crash (see the movie Alive! if you do not know what I am referring to) and the struggles and the challenges to make the decision to eat or not to eat - which was really deciding to live or not to live. He had a lot of details about their experience that in a different circumstance you would swear we were about to enter a scene of from a Hannibal Lector movie.
Eyeball man took a different angle and told me about how in his youth he had a choice of military or public service and he chose public service and was assigned to parametric team for a year. He was surprised the most about the way other people reacted when he would arrive on the scene. People would just stand there and watch other people die or get more injured and never provide a helping hand. They would almost seem just frozen or gawking to the point of inaction. Convinced these people would be the type that when confronted with the hypothetical question if they would help some one in danger they would respond emphatically yes.
These conversations sparked a challenge to my perception that we can know who we are and how we will respond to any situation that is extreme or perhaps even out of our normal experience. I spend a gazillion hours clearly defining myself and am fascinated by the idea that all my constructs of self may or may not hold up under unusual circumstances. Someone suffers or loses someone or something and we all have a judgment for what is the acceptable response in those situations. While not all our individual responses may align, in our mind we all have an answer (I think this is true but I have no facts) that comes to our minds immediately on the appropriate and even acceptable response. Those may be different as we have tolerance for not having the appropriate response but there is an acceptable answer as well that we have self-defined.
Would I eat human meat? If I really believed it was the only way to survive, most definitely. Would I crack under the pressure and turn into a screaming shrew on Amazing Race? I totally believe I would become irritated and unglued. Would I help someone who was being hurt or victimized in front of me? I would say yes unless the risk to my own self was too high. I do not think I would run into a burning building or draw sniper fire away from a victim, as the fear of my own safety would out weigh the desire to help a fellow human in distress. How would I manage a death of someone close to me? I think I would be sad, mourn and move on keeping the sadness inside and swallowing it for no one else to see. Are my responses acceptable or appropriate to everyone, probably not but they are how I see myself.
I know I deal with things but cutting them out of my mind and heart so I do not feel things that hurt. I know that I genuinely want to help people but my own desire to survive is stronger than my sense of duty to my fellow human. I know that I do not believe in god or the afterworld and actually have very little enthusiasm about this life, this world and in the end would risk and retreat more than I would be proud of seeing in action.
I have historical trauma that tends to support my understanding of myself, but is it that the things I think relate are really shadows in comparison to an extreme condition? I have to believe my childhood was a bit of an extreme condition. I look at the years after childhood, full of strange and awful things and yet I survived them as I would have expected. The question in my mind is if we really do not know what we would do in an extreme circumstance or are we just not very honest with others and ourselves around us when we are asked.
