Ordinarily Extraordinary

It doesn't even mention Julius Caesar or the Ides of March.

It's from a very different segment of the play

It's not even the famous part of that segment that everyone knows by heart

The "I'm just sayin'" attitude of all the Seinfeldians in the screenshot (although if memory serves, what they're actually saying is, "not that there's anything wrong with that")

It just comes at the whole situation in such an oblique fashion

I don't think I've ever seen an Ides of March meme do anything like this before

...but then I started wondering what meat they put on breakfast sandwichs in AU if they don't use breakfast sausage and it turns out they DO use breakfast sausage, at least at McDonalds, which brings me to why I'm actually here:

To try and use those recipes i just have to buy actual sausages and take the meat out of the skins.

Sausage only refers to actual sausages here. Also I’d call that a hamburger patty in the pic above, but that might just be me?

We don't really do "breakfast sausage" here. If you have a sausage for breakfast in Australia you'd be having one of these:

Beef is Only brought into American breakfast when steak or corned beef hash is involved, or in some regions, ground beef sawmill gravy served on toast called Shit on a Shingle by some. It’s a military thing.

Sausage in America can mean many things, but by and large, it is pork based. We have so much pork, you have no idea how much pork we have. Plus we have national and state pork associations constantly wanting us to eat more pork. We typically have two choices for breakfast sausage, patties and links. Both are seasoned with similarly, but patties, as you have seen are without a casing. Some links also come without casings, especially at diners. Breakfast sandwiches are classic convenience food here and can be had at almost any outlet every morning. Turkey sausages are also to be had at breakfast for those inclined, but rarely at restaurants.

(You didn’t ask but my peak breakfast sandwich is indeed the sausage egg and cheese biscuit at McDonald’s. Biscuit meaning the butter and buttermilk based fluffy deliciousness of course, not a cookie.)

Example:

As a kid, I constantly lived in fear of damaging shit in my parent's house. The walls. The floors (especially the floors. The wood was beautiful. Shiny. But so easy to scratch). The cabinets.

As a sixteen-year-old, I once took my car to the dealership after work and paid a very dear sum of $250 ($10/hr cashier salary) to fix a slight scratch in the paint because I knew if my father saw it there would be hell to pay. It didn't matter that I parked far out, like I'd been taught, and someone scratched it anyway. It was my fault. I failed in my duties as a steward of my vehicle.

Every time I scratched a rim on a curb while parallel parking or got a door ding or, god forbid, didn't wash and vacuum that car every weekend, it was treated like some sort of moral failing.

Last year, when my husband and I first moved into our house, he scraped the side of our car when parking in our (Very Narrow) garage. When he told me, my first instinct was to be afraid for him. Like something terrible was going to happen to him because of this mistake. I urgently reassured him that it was okay, it was an accident, I wasn't mad. Baffled, he was like, "Yeah? I know? Like, thank you for the reassurance, but I'm only a little annoyed, I'm not upset. It's just a car." And I had to take several minutes to process that. It's...just a car.

We keep the car tidy. We maintain it. But we wash it maybe 4x a year. We only vacuum it after dirty road trips or when the dog hair starts to get annoying. It has scrapes and dings and the leather seats have stains. But that's ok. Because it's just a car.

This morning, I realized that a small rock had gotten embedded in the felt foot on one of our bar stools. Neither of us had noticed. There are now scratches on our beautiful hardwood floor. My immediate response was fear accompanied by a heavy measure of paralyzing guilt. "I'm so sorry," I told my husband, "I should have noticed. I'll figure out how to fix it, I swear. I can probably sand down that section and match the stain and--"

"Whoa, hey," he said. "It was an accident. And it's fine. Floors are going to get damaged. They're floors. We live here. There was damage in places before we even bought the house, remember? It's not a big deal. It's just a floor." Right. It's just a floor. Right.

My husband's mom is visiting and this afternoon, as I was sitting in the kitchen looking at the scratches on the floor, I offhandedly asked her if my husband had ever broken or damaged anything as a kid. "Of course," she said. Household items. A TV. A wrecked car during his teen years. I asked how she punished him.

"Why would I punish him for things like that?" she said. "They were all accidents."

My friend and I were driving to Indianapolis to meet my sister to run in a Color Run for charity. We were coming in the night before so that we could stay at a hotel and get there early to explore the park. At this time, GPS was spotty at best, and I hadn’t driven in the area before, or in any large cities, and it was dark.

We arrived at the address I had put into the GPS, as my sister called asking where the hell we were, and we realized that we weren’t in the right place. I had forgotten a W or an E in the address, and we were over half an hour away from where we were supposed to be.

My body paralyzed itself with shame and I had to focus on not just breaking down and sobbing with fear. I had ruined everything by being careless. Again.

My friend wasn’t even phased. She said, no worries, we can stop and get a soda and head back toward the hotel. It’s not a big deal.

And it really hit me. It wasn’t a big deal. It was a setback but not a serious one. Why was I so conditioned to react this way?

The next time I was home, I knocked over a cup and spilled some water on the kitchen floor, and when I turned to get a towel, my mom proceeded to snap at me to be careful and that I had never been able to pay attention to what I was doing and on and on.

He doesn't think it's a rude thing to say in front of a monster. There are no rude things to say to monsters, only rude things monsters say.

"Don't worry," she says between bites, "You're one of the good ones."

"But I am still a monster," I do not say. I do not say that I love my claws and teeth, my prehensile shadow and my glowing eyes. That I cannot imagine giving them up even for survival, that to hide my shadow and trim my claws for them makes me feel diminished. In public I cannot say that I do not wish to be human.

They're progressives, this bunch, even if he carries a hero's banner with its proud history and none of them ask him to put it away. They know there are good monsters, monsters who can speak eloquently and hold the fork right, monsters you can be seen with in public. Some of their best friends are monsters.

They do not know the monster who is invited to brunch knows solidarity with the monster who is not. Believes and understands the monster who is not invited more than the human who does the inviting.

"Isn't that a little harsh?" says a third human, and I have not forgotten I am outnumbered. "We have ways of killing monsters without blood now, painlessly. And, of course, a monster should be allowed to live if it never growls."

He has never seen me growl. Yet how loudly and endlessly I will, when I'm out of earshot. He's talking about killing monsters who cannot stoop to civility, about mother and brother and lover who were never able to mute themselves like me, and does he not know how small a child who can only growl is?