“Happy Paczki day!”
That’s my first email the other day. Paczki? Uhm. Is that like a German plague? Whatever it is, somebody’s given it to me. I have no idea. I have no coffee in my veins. I’m lucky to know my name is Frank.
Oh….
“It’s like a doughnut, only denser.”
“What could be stupider than a doughnut?”
“You know what I mean!” Yeah, it’s a morning wish from the Pirate Queen. She’s traveled the world swashing buckles and is now showing her cultural superiority by wishing me a happy day of foreign pastries.
Paczki? I still have no idea. I’m a Californian; we pretend to be cultured, but it’s more fad than tradition. If it’s older than 15 minutes ago, we’ve never heard of it. Apparently it takes longer than that for a paczki to work through your digestive system. No wonder I’ve never heard of paczki—I don’t have that much bathroom time scheduled in my day.
The Pirate Queen has and she’s trying to share it. Well, the culture, not the bathroom time. We’re getting closer, but we’re not that close yet—especially not from twenty-five hundred miles away. She explains that paczki is a Fat Tuesday tradition. As a heavy guy, I know about Fat Tuesday. I just don’t know about this lead pastry. My pirate doesn’t have much more info to sail past me. She just wants to share because this is just something she’s grown up with.
It’s not something I’ve grown up with. I grew up with the spliced communiy of my parents--a cornbread and cabbage household. My youth was a shepherd’s pie of cultural cuisine, customs, and etymology. Traditions rooted in the homogeny of old-world inclusion mean nothing to me.
Lost, I go to the melting pot of useless knowledge; I see what Wikipedia is serving.
They offer me a steaming pile of polish doughnuts. I know there’s a joke here, but I’m not gonna say it. Any culture armed with throw-able pastries is one best kept fat and happy.
Wikipedia also says that paczki is pronounced “ˈpɔ̃t͡ʂɛk.” Uhm, yeah, you got me. I’m a redneck Scot. That’s ineffable, and if I can’t eff it, it’s no use to me.
“Yeah, eff you too!”
I tried Google. They offered me a site I could effing understand. Their site not only offered a paczki recipe, they served a pronounceable suggestion: “poonch-key.” They’re apparently using MyEx’s pronunciation key. “Conflict Resolution” is pronounced “Divorce.” Yeah, sounds just like it looks.
I do find out that this paczki thing does have a rich history. Apparently it originally had nothing to do with Fat Tuesday, but was part of the Polish Fat Thursday. The day of cupboard cleaning before the bare pantry of lent. They cleared out all the foods they couldn’t eat and made fatty meals and heavy pastries for one last feast before Easter.
Some time around medieval times, Polish kings found that if they filled the pastry with napalm, it became a perfect weapon, and thus, the paczki-pult was created and turned the course of world history. At least this was the cultural input from one web site.
It’s amazing what we’ve done with the internet. We’ve created a paczki of misinformation. A sugary treat filled with whatever we shelved in our brains. We cook it up, throw it on the web, and it sits there until somebody’s system finally digests it.
We’re a culture of web lemmings. Somebody speaks out in spite: it’s gospel, and we swallow it. And notice I say “we.” I’m not better than the little guy jumping the cliff before me. I swallowed that Glade plug-ins were a serious fire hazard, and the Swiffers were a health risk to my cat.
It tasted like paranoia and it tasted good.
And I’m not anti internet, it’s like any other culture. There are good things, there are fun things, and there are great things to share. And right now, I’m enjoying the aspect of good sharing. It’s a feast. A melding of cultural cupboards I have a pirate who likes to share tasty pastries, and I can’t see a thing in the world wrong with that.
Happy Paczki Day indeed.
No comments:
Post a Comment