Confessions of a Liberal Puritan

I caught a bit of "Semi-Homemade with Sandra Lee" on the Food Network while I was getting ready to leave for work this morning (right now, I'm sitting in my empty classroom, in case anybody forgot they're supposed to use this time to work on their take-home test, if they haven't already finished it), and it reminded me of a conversation in the hospitality suite at WriterCon this past July.

I forget just who was in the group at the moment, and I'm pretty sure I had a plate of shaddyr's wonderful food on my lap while talking (just because I almost always seemed to have a plate of unusually nourishing consuite food when I was in the suite at WriterCon), but we were talking about fandom and fanfic (naturally!), and it occurred to me that what many of us do with our pre-packaged, commercially produced, favored media texts is somewhat analogous to what Sandra Lee does with the packaged foods in her pantry:

We use them as a starting point, as a springboard, to "get to the good stuff", as it were, to the point where our creativity and search for meaning can be most fully explored.

I have to leave now, to get to my second job at the publishing house, but I wanted to jot this down, so I can continue to develop this line of thought later this week, rather than simply forget about it for another few months.