Dream Journal: Mom runs for Governor

I need to keep up on these dream journal posts better. I've had some interesting dreams lately but never get around to writing them down. The one I'm going to talk about now also illustrates another waking-world issue that I have been wanting to spout off about anyway, so the timing is perfect.

I dreamt that my mother had started a campaign to be elected governor of the state of Wisconsin. In real life, my mother has never run for office nor been involved in public activism, nor ever expressed any interest in doing so. She's not a joiner like that, and not interested in being a leader like that. Yet, within the dream context, it seemed like a logical development, and I felt as if I had seen the growth of her political career from the beginning. Much of the actual action of the dream was a phone conversation with her (seen in a weird split-screen mode, where I was on the phone with her at my own home in St. Louis, but I could still see her in her home in Wisconsin, also on the phone). She was trying to impress upon me the importance that I not speak to the media about certain things, particularly not the "sizement tax issue."  No idea in the waking world what the "sizement tax issue" might be, but in the dream it made sense, and was evidently a hot-button issue in her political campaign and one with which see seemed concerned about my opinion or what I might say to others about it (because she suspected that I opposed her position on the sizement tax). And it went on and on in a fairly nonsensical mode like this until I finally dragged myself back into wakefulness.

This dream is interesting to me in the sense that it highlights something that it is true about me but which I try to not say in a super-blunt way because I don't want to sound like a haranguing dick all the time or make people think that I am incapable of a civil conversation. But this is it: Until the Republican Party at the national level drops its objections to marriage equality (and a number of other offensive positions), there is no way, under any circumstances, that I would vote for, or even consider voting for, anyone for any office at any level of government who calls him or herself a Republican. Not President, not Governor, not Senator nor Congressman. Not state assemblyman nor state senator, nor city mayor, nor small-town mayor. Not for excise commissioner, nor city councilwoman, nor president of a garage sale, nor judge of a barbecue cook-off. No office whatsoever, until they quit, at their highest levels, their irrational bigotry. This includes my own mom.

My mom is a Sean-Hannity-watching, Bush-voting GOPer. While I love my Mom and while she has many wonderful attributes, if she were to run for high office, I would without a second thought come out publicly against her candidacy unless she repudiated this Fox News ideology. Because people who support that party's inflexible position in support of irrational, anti-science-based dumbassity should not be elected for anything for any reason. I don't care who they are or for what office they are running. 

And that was a good example of a dream that leaves me crabby the next day. Hate those!

Products that work

My day-job career (recently reborn) of being a chef working for a high-end catering and managed services company involves a lot of finding solutions. We constantly need to figure out how to best prepare new menu items, how to scale up ideas for food so that it can be presented in a quality way on a large scale, how to fix mistakes when they happen, how to get things between two points (both literally and conceptually). Again and again over the years I have found that what can save the day is a product that actually performs its intended function without any fuss.

A  mainstay of my day-job life and my home-kitchen life is food-service film. Civilians would think of this as "plastic wrap" or "Saran" wrap.  "Saran" is, of course, one of those brand-name words, like "Kleenex" or "Xerox" that became synonymous in colloquial usage with a type of product. But actual Saran Wrap and all of the other grocery-store brands in that same class are what we call, in the professional kitchen, "fucking worthless." For a film wrap to be efficacious, it needs to cling to itself, so that tight and taut seals can be formed. It needs both self-adhesion and a good degree of stretchiness. After generations of claims of ever more new and improved versions of this product for civilian use, they are all still fucking worthless. Yet these same plastic manufacturers produce for the professional kitchen a commonplace, ubiquitous product that does the job: food-service film. And, for about 12 or 13 bucks at Sam's Club or Costco, anyone can buy a 12"x3000' roll of it. Which will last any normal household for years.

Today my friend Pat called me with the news that his roll of such film had run out and that they had started on a new one. It was I who turned Pat on to buying this product in the first place. He did so around the time of the birth of his son. That was four years ago, and only now has he started on the second roll. By the time the kid is in college, he will probably only be on roll number 5. Here's a picture that I will explain below:


This is the current roll of film in my kitchen. I wrote on the box "May 2010" and "Roll 2." This means that May of this year is when we started using this roll of film and that it is the second civilian-use roll of film of the era of Jeff and me having a combined household. He and I both had our own rolls of this before we merged households almost seven years ago (mine dated back to 1999 and his to 2001) but both of those were sucked up by our restaurant in 2005. So, anyway, this is Roll 2 of the Common Era/Post-Restaurant. Roll 1 lasted even under heavy use from January 2007 until May 2010. Pat has also dated his new Roll 2 box, and we intend to follow our film wrap progress over the ages. Cuz we're dorks like that.

But also because we respect a product that offers value for money and that actually works. If you are still using "Saran" wrap and (worse) think it's satisfactory, then you are in for a pleasant, eye-opening revelation. Simple things that just work are the unsung heroes of, well, work.