Last evening J watched Super Size Me along with me. Except for a couple of four letter words there was not much else that I had to worry about for her. I figured it would be a good lesson for her on the perils on eating fast food.
She was very impressed by the scene where two doctors perform a gastric bypass surgery on man. When I was her age, something like that would have made given me cold sweat and I would have had nightmares. But J apparently is made of sterner stuff. She watched without batting an eyelid and slept like a log.
This morning J asked me write on a piece of paper "I am going to eat McDonalds for 30 days" and "Super Size Me" below that. Soon after, a surrealistic drawing appeared below it. It depicts a woman who ate at Burger King for 100 days, a man who ate at McDonalds for 1000. The way to tell the two apart was of course the size of the tummy relative to number of days of binging and the big hoop earrings on the woman. They look totally blissed out with their big smiley faces and hair standing out "like the sun". Not sure where J was going with that.
Further afield, a square with an M on top represented McDonalds and there was a similar depiction of Burger King in B. Servers and customers at the two stores were represented by circles positioned front and rear appropriately.
An interesting touch was a box connecting the two stores where a stick figure lay prone with her intestines being pulled out by a couple of doctors. Apparently that procedure would fix the tummy bulge and make them stop going to either M or B. I am assuming J prefers her intestines stayed in and will not be asking to be taken to McD anytime soon.
At a prominent spot at the bottom of the drawing was something that looked like an EKG. J says that shows what's inside the heads of the man and the woman. I wish Morgan Spurlock had made a similar documentary on his post McBinge detoxification diet and its salubrious effects on his body and soul. I am sure it would impress J a whole lot more than my daily hectoring on the subject.
An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t
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