jacque-ice pudderrida

I frequently want to dunk my head in a barrel of water to drown out all the theorists. Last night I was at a dinner party where Jacques Derrida was brought up over rice pudding. Yeah, I was thinking, "Oh noooooooo," too.

J.D. lead to referencing this obnoxious thing that some people came up with at some point. You get no more specifics than that because I'm so tired of dropping names. It's like if I knew anything about sports I could now draw a terrible metaphor to people who frequently do things like fumble. People fumble in croquet, right? (I'm going to come back to that later.) So this obnoxious thing: we know things, not from experience, but from talking about experience. So it's not so much that this weekend I was at a dinner party, it's that I have this phrase "dinner party" to describe this event. And "dinner party" conjures an image in your mind not so much because you yourself have been a member of a dinner party, but because after thoroughly digesting your Peking duck, the next day you met Ethel for tea where you discussed the various members of the dinner party and how atrocious it was when Bertie had clam juice dribbling down his chin. We're getting nitpicky here and saying that you'd still be an ignorant lump if we didn't have language to explain what happened to us. (That is, if I'm properly understanding the words and ideology people fling around.) Which is kind of genius. And kind of asinine.

Now we can rewind a few years to when I was in a class where my mates were trying to ascertain from the T.A. just what kind of papers we were supposed to be writing. At the time I thought the T.A. was not understanding the questions people were asking as he kept waving his arms and saying, "It's all semantics." I laughed then and now I laugh harder. One could say it was all semantics.

So saying things like fumbling and croquet in the same sentence brings up something else that happened at the dinner party. The rice pudding was a bit runnier than what is generally considered pudding (though still good). I facetiously suggested that we could add potato flakes. Five minutes later I realized that some people might have thought I was serious. Which caused me to (a) wonder if I'm becoming my father and (b) reflect upon how I have a growing respect for Monty Python and Bakhtin's interpretation of carnivalesque humor.

I can't believe the mumbo jumbo that comes out of my mouth/typtastic-fingers these days.

(pretty rice pudding picture taken from smitten kitchen, a very yummy blog.)