Another Day of Inadequate Parenting

Recently I decided that enough is enough. We would put a stop to our passive complicity with the oil companies and shop for locally grown produce. We would eat locally, be insufferably righteous globally. So today I dragged my daughter and my husband to the Union Square Greenmarket for as much overpriced, politically correct produce as we could afford.

If you have never seen smug vegetables before, here's the mother lode. The tomatoes are total divas. How many New York Times Eating In articles, how many wistful paeans on All Things Considered, how photo ops with Nigella Lawson holding them up in front of her bodacious ta-tas? Those tomatoes are so obvious. Give me a shallot. Peel me a grape. But enough with the showboaty heirlooms. I'm so over it.

We sampled, we pored over, we purchased fresh fruits, vegetables, herbs, juice and jam. By the time we reached the $10 pheasant sausage, I started to wonder: who the hell have I become? I used to own and occasionally wear a "Die Yuppie Scum" t-shirt. I used to vote Communist. Am I now the enemy? Because there I was, sampling an Upstate New York Pinot Grigio, pushing my Lucky Wang-clad daughter in her Maclaren, wearing my Marc Jacobs-by-way-of-Audrey-Hepburn shades and my John Varvatos laceless Converse All-Stars. And I thought, Oh. My. God.

But what do I do now? Where do I go from here? Have I always been a lightweight? Have I always been so easily undone by vanity? Do I really like all these things I dress myself in, or am I a slave to something else, like my insecurities about what other people see when they look at me? And then I think, no, I really do want that tartan jacket that's in the window at Intermix ($259.) I like it. I want it. I like it.

The point is. Am I yuppie scum? Do I deserve to die? Am I setting a horribly shallow example for my golden child to follow? Is it so horrible to eat well, to dress well? Aren't these sensual pleasures also the privileges of being human? For this lifetime, anyway, I was given a human brain and a human encasing. So why not fully be human? Why be ashamed of these qualities that are so much a part of the human experience?

And why do I default to shame? Well, that's another posting entirely.

And why am I not kinder, more generous with my time, more invested in this planet's state of affairs? Perhaps what I have become is not selfish or vain but lazily self-involved - so accustomed to tending to my own problems that my passion for justice has drifted to a drafty corner somewhere in the recesses of my heart.