We made pasta from scratch over the weekend. It took a couple of hours, start to dinner, and made an enormous, flour-y mess, mostly all over me, but also on the table, chairs, floor, maybe the walls a little bit… the Handsome Husband might have judged me.

The point is, the Kraken had entirely too much fun, there’s still probably dough sticking to the underside of the kitchen countertops, and we all got fresh pasta for dinner. Huzzah! Carbs for the win!!

But that night, as I was lying in bed, it occurred to me: how much would my great-grandmother judge me for this stuff? I mean, don’t get me wrong, I had some genuinely kick-ass relations who were way too busy running their lives like a boss to bother with judging other people, but in a theoretical sense, what would the women from generations past think of me? Here I am, living in the future, a time when I have the luxury of rejecting produce flown in this morning from across the world to my enormous, clean, bright grocery store, because it’s slightly bruised. My spawn is bored with toys that are ten times more advanced than any technology she’d ever see. We have dishwashers, for fuck’s sake! DISHWASHERS. Because getting your hands wet is for suckers and college students.

So here I am, living in the future, and here in the future I can go to one of several refrigerated areas of the grocery store, and choose from many different options of professionally-made fresh pasta, packaged and ready to go. There are also yards of shelves taller than I am, full of dried pasta that’s so cheap we offer it to children for craft projects. We make perfectly good food inedible, call it “art,” then throw it away without a thought. 

We are such assholes.

And then, to top it off, I spend hours making pasta from scratch, something that women toiled over daily for generations, just because I got bored. Hell, I make bread for fun, when there’s a perfectly good bag of pre-sliced bread right behind me, one that will magically keep without going stale for a week, because dude, we have preservatives in the future. And we complain about preservatives! DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH OUR GREAT-GRANDMOTHERS WOULD HAVE GIVEN FOR PRESERVATIVES?!

Imagine it. You dedicate hours of your life to the kitchen Every. Single. Day. It’s hot, boring, and thankless. You take hours to make dinner, only for everyone to devour it within minutes. Also, your husband’s probably a sexist asshole who doesn’t appreciate you, and your kids are probably dicks who complain all the time, because kids don’t really change, no matter the time zone. All you long for is a little time for yourself, a little space to rest your feet, maybe even read a ladies’ magazine, only first you’d need to learn to read, because it’s the past, so most of the world is just focusing on the infant mortality rate, not literacy.

And there’s your kid’s kid’s kid, with all these amazing innovations at her disposal, blithely disregarding all of them.

For fun.

Because things have gotten so out of hand that the shit you’d give everything to get away from is now a hobby.

Also, people have time for hobbies now. “What the hell is a hobby?” your great-grandmother wonders while she takes all day to just do the laundry for all eleven of her kids.

She’d probably wonder what the hell birth control is, but this was a different time. We’re talking condoms made out of intestine here people! You friggin’ rinsed and reused them, which sounds like some sort of horrifying infection just waiting to happen! WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?!

I… might have gotten a little off-topic there.

Where was I? Oh yeah, pasta.

Basically, my point here is that I’m an asshole from the future, and make things intentionally more difficult for myself out of boredom. That, and hand-made pasta is super delicious, and a great way to keep a wee gremlin entertained for the better part of an afternoon. Five stars, would make again!