Oh what a sad thought, that not everything could be improved with bacon. For a while, I was improving everything with bacon. Chocolate was wonderfully better if it was on bacon (and wasn't bacon SO much better with the chocolate all over it!??) Pasta is better with bacon (national dish of italy... pasta carbonnara), and so is salad. And nearly every sandwich is improved with the addition of bacon.
But... I figured there was an end to this wonderfulness somewhere. And I found it.
Grilled cheese is NOT better with bacon. Neither is a quesadilla. Yes, I know that many people are making exactly that type of combination as a current popular dish. But it doesn't work. Fat on fat on fat... just one too many. Butter or mayo or grease to fry the thing combined with cheese AND bacon... it's just too much. There's plenty of salt already in each of these dishes, with the cheese, so the salt pellet that a bite of bacon delivers is just excessive. Every once in a while, you just want to satisfy that part of your mouth that says, "I need salt and fat and creamy bacony crispness... I need mayo and butter and bacon and cheese all in the same dish... let me have that heart attack on a plate, please!" But three bites into it, all your needs for fatty, bacony, creamy, salty crispness is satisfied, and all that's left is 9/10 of a sandwich that you just hate to waste, but every bite makes you feel more & more sluggish, starts to sit like a lump in your stomach, and makes you need a nap, fast.
It's odd that something that sounds just SO RIGHT (heck, there's a reason lots of people put it on the menus,,, it DOES SOUND good, before you've tried it once or twice), but is just so wrong.
Not a lot different than many things in life. It's a matter of balance. And in these over-fatted, oversalted, overly savory dishes... they're out of balance.
If a 2 week vacation is good, a 2 year vacation might be better, right? No... wrong. There's something fun about forgetting your responsibilities for a while, particularly if you've planned for the expense and have got it all fit into your life... the time away from family, the money from your savings, the research you've done into the location ... these things are what makes it possible for you to free your mind and delve into the time off. And getting back to work is drudgery, for sure. Facing the stack of mail that was saved for you in your absence, doing the laundry and cooking for yourself again, having ot make your own bed rather than rely upon hotel staff...
But just because you (and I, and most everyone we know) complains about the drudgery of getting back to work, does NOT mean that work is something we might want to avoid in life. Work makes us feel good about ourselves, self-sufficient, special. We are accomplished and talented when we're at work. Or (even if we feel like our career is in the toilet and we're only sticking around for the paycheck) at least we are responsible members of society when the fruits of our labor makes it possible to pay our own rent and keep food on our own tables.
I'm at this stage in life where, for about the past decade and for about another decade, the people who are my friends are going through the launching of their children into the world. We're either kicking them out of the nest as soon as high school is over, or we're attending college graduations and then having to make decisions about whether to welcome them back for a while, and for how long if we do... In the process, it seems that my generation has done our kids' generation a disservice. About half of the kids who are graduating*, are doing so with the attitude that work is something to be avoided, minimized. That employers should be thankful that they are willing to show up for work, that paid vacation time is an inalienable right. They are surprised when failing to show up for work because they're taking it easy for the day, might get them fired.
They have been trained by us that the grindstone, the drudgery, the AWFULNESS of WORK, is worth avoiding, is beneath them. When WE graduated college, our parents were commenting that we were trying to get THINGS that THEY would have had to save and wait for... that we were using too much credit to accumulate stuff, that we were being impatient and expecting a higher lifestyle than our stage of life would suggest. Eventually we "got it". But in the process, we have lost something that our own parents' generation had. We took those first steps towards expecting others to take care of us. We demanded health benefits for everyone, and minimum wages that would support a family of 4. We insisted on the right for women to "choose", whether to work or stay home, whether to become a parent or not. And we did not even envision the need to become a one-car family if we could only AFFORD one car on one salary... no, we expected two cars and we insisted on GETTING THEM. WE convinced lenders to come up wtih creative financing deals so that we could accomplish this, stretching payments out to 7 years on cars we knew were going to become a problem to maintain after only 5 years, routinely rolling over upside down car loans into a new car loan whenever we wanted to get a new one, and even choosing to get long term leases on our vehicles, an option previously only appropriate for busineses that could write off the lease costs as costs of doing business.
WE are the generation that decided that zero down payments and high loan -to-value ratios were appropriate for home loans, because WE decided that the previous generation's ethic of requiring WORK and SAVING for a home should not be as difficult as it was.
And our choice to turn work into a lower priority, a drudgery... something to be avoided... it has started to seep into the next generation. But with a deeper problem... the current generation graduating high school and college have not witnessed their parents making it through hardship by working harder. Our generation has just made it through our most recent hardship, by declaring bankruptcy, allowing foreclosures, and looking for part time work (that we complain about loudly as not being able to sustain us). We have injected the kids with a big dose of "work is bad" pill, and now that they're graduating college and thinking... as their first post-college experience... that a trip to Europe is in order... a necessary relief from the long, hard, difficult studying days of college... and they'll think of work IF and WHEN they NEED to.
Yep, if they're boomeranguing back into our houses, if we've got SO MANY kids returning home rather than working, that we have a new term for it (boomerang kids)... it's our own darned fault.
Now... how does one convince a young adult that it's time to get a J-O-B? A kid who complained about working 10 WHOLE HOURS a week during summers in college???
Don't ask me. Best I can do is NOT open the doors for the boomerang. NOT offer to liquidate my retirement account to finance their latest desire to have a new car, or a trip to Europe, or ... whatever. Good luck kids. Your parents have not done you any favors by letting you think that life can be all bacon and no salad. It's too bad.
Because a BLT is a WHOLE lot better with L & T!
* This is just from casual observation, I can't cite a scientific study about this right now, though I know some have been done about the attitudes of the current 20-somethings... if I get a good source to cite, I will give a more scientifically supported statistic here.
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