This was a truly significant moment in my life, and there is a reason that I still remember Chris’s grinning, red-rouged cheeks and Haley’s big, brown dismayed eyes beneath her adorable nineties bob. It was the first moment in my life where the right thing to do was also wrong.
“You could argue that,” my professor responded, “but where’s the line between saying something hateful, and saying something offensive? I think that line exists, but you have to define it.”
Weep for the world. Weep for the broken hearted, the half hearted, the heartless and the two hearted murderers. Weep for liberty. Weep for fraternity. Weep for the encyclopedia of troubled souls.
As I opened my mouth, I realized I was about to put words to a trend I’d been observing in my faith life but that until this point had dozed cozily in my subconscious: “I don’t care as much as I used to, and I’m kind of fine with it.”
Now that I’m reasonably adult-ish, I’m not so hard on my mother. She still cries at all movies, and she still sings only harmonies, but I tend to stay in the room for these things now.
On bad days, I get worried not when the writing dries up but when it comes too easily, when it tumbles out onto the keyboard with a clatter like a hailstorm. Obviously, in those moments, something went wrong.
But this town won’t be mine for much longer. Rent payments have nearly wiped out my savings, so in about a month, I’ll be moving into my aunt and uncle’s farmhouse forty-five minutes away.
From the empire’s old favorites—Tafelspitz and Kaiserschmarrn—to the Würstlstand, present on every street corner, the sausage-vending culinary bastion of the drinking and working classes, the way to the Austrian identity goes through the taste buds and down into a satisfied, high-caloric stomach.
So I scoop the Cherry Pineapple Parfait, listen to Katy Perry, and wonder if any of my effort will ever make any difference or if I’ll always be as powerless and obsolete as a plastic bag drifting through the wind.
So how did we get here? The short answer: a bevy of resources and good old-fashioned guilt. We got married, and suddenly there was this room of pots and pans and spatulas and measuring cups and blenders and spice racks.
