Barbarians Anonymous
One of the neat things about St Blogs is the creativity of its parishioners: not just blogging and tweaking of templates, but music, poetry, cooking, animation, cigars, books of all kinds….
As for me, I’ve thought about it, and I’ve finally come to the realization that I am a barbarian. I wish I weren’t. But I am.
Part of it is due to my suburban upbringing. My family moved around a lot when I was growing up, and always from newish suburb to newish suburb. So I never got to know any place well, and the places I did live kind of looked like all the others. Even the food was pretty much the same; I’ll have to take Kathy and Davey’s parents’ word for it that we had gen-you-wine New York pizza for lunch yesterday. I never knew “New York style pizza” was anything more than some kind of marketing thing. I have no region to call home, no city or town whose special little quirks are part of my own quirky history.
Even in my own faith I am a barbarian. I have come into nothing in the way of Traditions handed down from the Old Country, so I don’t know how to do anything cool and authentically Catholic like making beautiful Easter eggs or sumptuous Christmas Eve feasts. I don’t know many old Catholic hymns — start Adoro Te Devote, Veni Sancte Spiritus, or even On This Day O Beautiful Mother and watch me just sit there (unless you were kind enough to bring a hymnal for me.)
I can get a meal on the table, but as far as being schooled in a cuisine with a history, like Pansy and Erik — forget it. I think I was twenty-five before I knew that Parmesan cheese doesn’t necessarily come from a green can.
I can barely sew. I’m terrible at choosing clothes, and I have no sense of style. I don’t know much about embroidery, knitting, or any other traditional crafts. I can’t speak a foreign language. I can’t play a sport with any degree of skill.
Music? I can pick out a tune on the piano, but that’s about it. I know almost nothing about music history or theory (mention the word mode if you want to see my brain instantly shut down.) Drawing? I can sketch a little, but lack the talent or skill to do anything advanced with it. Reading? A mile wide, an inch deep; there’s no topic or author I think I could call myself knowledgeable about. Writing? I can’t even compose a limerick. In high school I swooned over poetry and tried my hand at writing a couple of poems and stories, but even then I was afraid I could never Be a Writer because I had nothing to write about. I kept a journal into my twenties, but gave it up and destroyed the old journals. They were so trite they made me sick.
Basically I feel like I’ve been dropped on this Earth with a birth certificate, a Baptismal certificate, and a bit of a knack for doing well on standardized tests like the GRE. Again, part of this is my own unsettled, rootless upbringing this. Another part of this is not being encouraged to develop skills or interests (or discouraged from doing so, as the case may have been), and part of this is my own darn laziness.
Bobos attempt to get an identity by buying it. I know that won’t work. But is there a remedy for barbarianism?