Monthly Archives: May 2008

Picture this: It is quiet, foggy Friday morning and 2 nocturnal creatures who just happen to be married are whiling away the time in front of their screens. Creature A realizes Creature B has done some creative conjuring to produce a mouse pad where no mousepad is to be found.

Creature A: you’re using our next president’s face as a mousepad?
Creature B: Laughs. I wouldn’t care if it was our current president.

But Creature A is perplexed. It is not the current president. It is the candidate for whom both creatures root. There must be some subliminal message in this.

Or, perhaps, it’s just a silly coincidence that Obama’s face is on the magazine Ryan is using as a make-shift mousepad.

I have a love-hate relationship with my kitchen.

On the one hand, it’s mine or, at least, as close to mine as anything gets these days. Ryan tends to leave it alone so I govern it in any way I choose.

On the other hand, I don’t particularly love anything that the kitchen was made for using it for – dishes and cooking mainly and the messes left by said activity.

Dishes are messy and I always wind up wet with dishwater or get a fair amount on the floor. I also don’t love having to scrub until my fingers fall off. Ryan, as much as I love him, is hopeless when it comes to the fine art of rinsing dishes before putting them into the sink rather than letting them sit and become encrusting with what might have once been a sandwich or chicken strips or the-end-all-be-all of disgusting food remains RANCH DRESSING.

Now let’s talk about cooking. Some people are wonderful cooks and chefs. They do not need recipes and, if for some reasons they choose to use them, they deviate in a way that turns a simple meal into a piece of fucking art. I once knew a man with white carpet in his kitchen; he is one of those people. Let’s get this straight: I am not one of those people!

I don’t know how anyone can make food look like a masterpiece. My goal? Make it edible. I don’t know how anyone can finish baking or cooking with a spotless kitchen. My goal? Make it without any major catastrophes. And I certainly can’t keep myself looking like one of those 50s housewives by the time I’m done. My goal? Don’t sweat into the chicken too much.

Cooking demands far more time and energy than I want to give to something that I don’t naturally love. I am not a great chef because I lack 2 important qualities: desire for precision and patience. Coincidentally, this is also why I would make a bad sniper.

Precision, you ask? Yes, precision. Precisely. It’s not something I strive for. I like the feeling of a job well done if it’s a job I like to do not one I must do out of necessity or because someone else tells me to do it. Cooking is just one of those things. Even if I really desire the outcome – edible, even delicious food – the process is something I despise.

What’s the deal with patience? Unless it’s something I can put in the oven and forget about, I become agitated about the time and attention cooking demands. I don’t want to stand around “stirring occasionally” or watching for bubbles or thickening of paste or what-have-you. Even if I know that something needs constant attention I tend to get distracted by – oh – the internet and – wouldn’t you know it! – the food has become slightly charred.

So this attitude toward cooking generally means I do a sloppy job. I don’t tend to fully read through recipes which means I usually don’t get them quite right and don’t notice until it’s too late.

No, the food isn’t art and, yes the kitchen is a mess by the time I’m done which usually means more dishes that I’m not happy to do. It also results in careless accidents like, say, leaving the sugar bag over the burner where the vent pipe it for the oven and having it turn into a molten glob of sugar-lava on top of and inside my oven!

Remember how I don’t like scrubbing? I’m still working on that one. Coincidentally, those cookies were the best I ever made despite the fact that I thought they’d turn out horribly.

You’d think this fuck all attitude would make me the perfect candidate for playing Grand Theft Auto IV buuut, I’ll leave that pleasure to my beloved. -smirks-

I didn’t go out with a bang so much. no, work went out with a bang or, rather, it sent me out with what seemed like a bullet to the stomach. My last day was horrible.

Underlying it all was the unbearable heat in the cage. I’d say it wagers from 20 – a million degrees hotter in there than the rest of the club and out doors. Unfortunately, it’s a glassed in room with no circulation. I literally would be dripping sweat unless I was sitting directly in front of the fan, not moving at all. It’s probably issue enough to arise health concerns but no one seems to give a damn at all. This made me miserable.

It also gave me a headache. For some reason, heat like that makes my mouth dry and causes my jaw to hurt which turns into a headache. I know it probably sounds like whining when I say “OMG it’s hot in there” and use it as part of my reason to quit but if you worked there, you’d understand.

I awoke with my back hurting and although this eventually subsides, I found myself having new pains during the day: cramps. Now, I haven’t had cramps or even a period for some time because of my IUD so I wasn’t expecting it at all. In fact I assumed it couldn’t even be my period and didn’t check until I accidentally noticed while flushing the toilet. Nice one, ovaries.

Now on top of those two things I experienced the usual feast-or-famine deal with customers which means I either have a bunch at once or none – for hours. I’m not a person who takes being bored very well, especially when a proxy blocks all the good sites at work. After checking in on a few forums, I was bored out of my skull for the entire day while being physically uncomfortable. Nothing like having time on your hands to think about being miserable.

Besides that, nothing went horribly wrong except for the fact that my eyes were bigger than my stomach when it came to ordering lunch – I had a fajita and a sandwich. I ate the former and had no room for the latter. I wound up tossing most of it because it quickly became disgusitng sitting in the heat of the cage. This made me a bit sad.

I’m really glad to be done with that place, though!