I was at the store yesterday pointing out to a friend how to pick avocados. You want them firm, better firm than too soft.
You know the feeling, you open an avocado and have an expectation. And sometimes it's perfect but a lot of times it's not quite right. Sometimes it's all wrong.
We purchase these commodities with some unchecked expectations. What's the deal with that? We desire the platonic ideal, the best, perfection.
Our money is pure form, pure abstraction. It knows no differentiation and suffers from no degradation. And to trade it for anything less than an object that conforms to the ideal, the perfect avocado, would be a compromise, a let down, a fools bargain.
One of the earliest tantrums I remember throwing as a child was receiving an "in and out burger" that was wrong. Well, wrong in that it did not correspond to what I wanted. Of course it was fine, dare I say delicious (despite what you haters out there think). I must have felt some cosmic injustice, the perfection had been spoiled.
These responses seem childish; reality is always more complex than the bill of goods we are sold; as we grow old we temper our expectations because there's no room for idealism. And yet our systems of commodification and quantification make no room for uniqueness. We expect uniformity. We are entitled to the ideal. We are all karens under capitalism.
Some days I get a little less avocado with my breakfast, which is okay since I don't measure calories, or worry about appearance; it's just me. I just mash the thing and enjoy avocado; it all goes to the same place said my godfather (in the rare occasion I was picky about food as a child, I would not like the foods mixing on my plate). A lot of my cooking has become slurrified, unmeasured, a stew of delectable things.
I prefer a style where precision and expectations are held lightly.
I seek to cultivate more spaces in life where uniqueness can come through without the death knell of precision. There are some things that can't (or shouldn't) be rated, computed, measured, judged, objectified. Even to describe them, to give them language, tampers their uniqueness. animism
I study the space where I hold on to idealism and release my grasp. I strive to love uniqueness, embrace imperfection. But still, a part of me rejoices when there's a beautiful unblemished avocado awaiting me inside.
Image recognition to train my algorithm to detect "avocado" in perfect form. #idea/image
topic:: consumerism, capitalism, ontology
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