Fried

I visited my grandparents in Tennessee last week. Both were well, my grandfather will be 98 on August 28th. He is amazing and still sharp as a tack, despite being very frail.

Aside from good times with my grandfather and grandmother, I mostly caught up with my parents. A week with one's parents can be a long time, but in my case I was happy to be with them. I feel like I've really caught up with them, even though I live only 10 minutes away and I see them almost every weekend. 32 hours of driving, a large part through the most boring landscape on earth, Ohio, tends to bring out subjects rarely discussed otherwise. My mother, in particular, was in good spirits. They had been in France for 5 weeks prior to this trip to the USA. In Tennessee, I managed to do some cool things with their France pictures on my new MacBook, which I had purchased the day before the trip. Je suis un geek.

In Nashville, we saw 2 great exhibits at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, in beautiful downtown. Yes, there's more to Nashville than the Grand Ole Opry and the Nashville Predators... Not much, but still.

The Quest for Immortality was an ancient Egyptian artifact collection, brilliantly narrated by Jeremy Irons. Yes, the gynecologist twins from Dead Ringers explaining how the Sun God's earthly form is a dung beatle is quite a powerful experience. The objects were very beautiful.

The other exhibit was a collection of the top Pulitzer prize winning photographs of the last 100 years. It was very, very good. The picture of the starving Sudanese child crawling towards a refuge camp and away from a lurking vulture was very chilling. It's what awaits us all if we don't smarten up.

I ate fried foods and pork throughout most of the trip. Tennessee peeps need some slimming down. A majority of people are overweight. They need to snap out of it. At some point, if one is already a mastodon, it's a good thing to realise that it's suicide to eat chicken fried steak. Try a salad, some greens, some delicious tomatoes that are produced in your own back yard. (We ate tomatoes all week too.) Not eating quite as much can still be patriotic and "country", all y'all don't worry.