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Dinner With the Family

September 3rd, 2011 by Manda | 9 Comments | Filed in Family, Food, Question of the Week

I grew up in a house where every member of my family would gather around the dinner table every night for a hot meal and eat together. My mother would suffer no excuses when it came to eating dinner as a family; it was a constant in her household. The only exceptions I can recall is that if one of us were not at home during dinnertime (frowned upon) or if one of us were sick (excusable).

I think a lot of her insistence on eating dinner together as a family is because it was a part of the day where everyone would gather ’round and eat, talk, and bond. It was her time to catch up with her children and for my brother and I to argue about something stupid. As my mom always cooked dinner, eating dinner together also had something to do with politeness and manners. She cooked the meal; it would have been the height of rudeness if one of us had taken a plate of home-cooked food and eaten it on our lonesome in our bedroom or something.

Now that I’m on my own and have a packed schedule, I find that I’m often eating dinner on my own, and usually on the go. I’ll grab a burrito at Chipotle and eat it once I get home from my internship. I’ll eat a bagel sandwich from Einstein’s Bagels during my afternoon shift at work. I’ll eat a bowl of Special K in the morning before I take off for the day. I’ll cook dinner for myself and eat it in front of the TV, saving leftovers for the next day. My schedule often allows me to get dinners with friends, but we almost always go out to eat.

I love the food and conversation I have with my friends when we go out to eat, but I miss the dinners at my house. I can’t imagine what it’s like to grow up in a house where family dinners didn’t exist. It’s not even the home-cooked factor (although I miss that dearly!), it’s the fact that I can’t understand how families don’t, or can’t, or won’t, come together for dinner. It makes me sad, because I have some great memories of dinners at my house when I was growing up!

Question of the Week: Does your family have family dinners where you all eat together? Or is dinner an individual occasion?

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Classic English Literature

June 6th, 2011 by Manda | 4 Comments | Filed in Entertainment, Question of the Week

I’ve been spending most of my spare time reading on my Kindle while I’ve been on the road. I’ve taken advantage of free public domain books to read some of the classics in English literature in an effort to expand my literary horizons. For years and years I’ve said I’ve wanted to read Dickens, Bronte, etc. Now, I’ve finally gotten off my lazy ass and have started reading them. For someone who once considered an English literature minor, it’s about time I started devouring more of the classics!

These are the ones I’ve read so far this summer:

  • The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
  • Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
  • A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
  • Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
  • Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Next on my list are Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen, and perhaps some Shakespeare.

Question of the Week: What English classics would you recommend to read?

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The Definition of “Hooking Up”

February 13th, 2011 by Manda | 7 Comments | Filed in Question of the Week, Relationships

This is something I’ve always wondered – how do people define the term “hooking up”?

I looked it up on Urban Dictionary to see if there was a general consensus about what the term defines, and this was the first definition I found:

Hooking up: An incredibly ambiguous phrase that drives me absolutely insane when people use it.
Example: John hooked up with Mary. (So what did they actually do? Did they meet at the park? Did they talk? Or did they duke like viagra-injected rabbits? Who knows…)

In junior high, “hooking up” essentially just meant making out. But as I got older and my friends and I got more experienced with all the possibilities of the definition of “hooking up,” we never adapted a new term. Let it be making out, messing around, or sex – no matter what it is, it’s always described as “hooking up.”

Sometimes, though, my friends and I clarify what exactly happened while hooking up. Take a conversation I had last night, for example:

Friend: I can’t go to that club tonight. So-and-so will be there and I don’t want to see him.
Me: Oh? Did you hook up with him or something?
Friend: Yeah. But we only made out. Nothing more.

In that case, what hooking up meant was crystal clear. But more often than not, I’ve found myself using “hooking up” as a blanket term for my experiences. I think it’s the safest term to use when you have to ‘fess up about something but don’t want to be in a position of kissing and telling. The ambiguity is a godsend, sometimes; if a group of girlfriends are insistent on finding out what happened, saying that you “hooked up” is enough for them to know something happened. The rest can be left to the imagination.

Question of the Week: How do you define “hooking up”? Has the definition of the term changed over time for you? Do you say you hooked up with someone, or do you use more specific terms?

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