Visiting a Farmer's Market

I visited the farmer's market closest to home today after church and I found it was cool as well as a bit distressing.

It was a place that brought all kinds of products from all kinds of cultures — Chinese, a little Japanese, a smidge of Korean, a lot of Vietnamese, some Thai, some South Asian, Latin American and Caribbean in general, and even some West African — under one roof. It was cool to see them, to try and decipher them and wondering which ones people really went for more regularly than others. I wondered who in there was a restaurant owner/operator/manager going there to buy ingredients for his/her latest culinary project (or just what they're doing regularly) and who was there as a person who just wanted stuff to cook the only things they know how to cook.

I saw mostly the latter, and there were a couple guesses at the former. I'd even saw some people like me who were getting produce probably because it's a little less expensive than even the bigger grocery stores…

I thought about the fact this country of the United States of America has given me the opportunity to see stuff from so many different places and be able to possibly sample of them.

But then I found myself trying not to cry because I'm just "a boring guy with no fixed cultural identity" that I can rapidly claim as my own. I have the British-Jamerican thing I give myself, and I've spoken about how people from the British side and the Jamaican side would probably have words with me about how I'm neither of those things properly. I wanted, while I was there, so badly to be the elderly probably-Chinese-or-Vietnamese (because she, unlike some others, wasn't immediately identifiable to me as one or the other) woman I'd kept patiently waiting for to notice me to be able to pass her in the narrow aisles who had stuff in her cart she was "obviously" going to use to cook her native meals she knows (me conscious simultaneously of this being an almost very American and kind of patronizing thing to think) instead of the wannabe me.

This makes me think of today's sermon about seasons, though. It really spoke to me, because I keep envying others even though they're in one season and I'm in another. I'll get to where I need to be eventually, but it's all so damn frustrating a lot of the time.