With both of my roommates out of town for the weekend, I faced a
harsh realization ““ if I didn’t learn how to cook,
there was a chance I would die. Or upon return my roommates would
find me on the floor, curled in the fetal position, sucking on my
thumb, a stack of empty pizza boxes by my side.
Living in an apartment is hard. Stuff doesn’t clean
itself. You think you are pretty tough because you play badminton
or do the uneven bars, well, try living on your own. Trash
doesn’t take itself out. NOTHING gets taken care of here,
man. You have to do dishes, launder stuff and dust stuff. My
initiation into the sport of self-sustainment was not without
growing pains.
I mean, come on, when I’m shopping at Ralph’s, how I
am supposed to know that avocados should be firm when purchased?
What the hell is guacamole anyway? And those
self-checker-outer-thingies at Ralph’s ““ WHAT IS THE
DEAL WITH THAT?
I’m wigging out.
Because I wake up each morning to a crippling fear of the fetal
position and anchovy-laced pizza, I have invented a new strategy to
deal with the day ““ household activities are now sports. The
whole thing reminds me of my days of Pop Warner football
superstardom before I tore my ACL and my PCL returning a punt in
the 1984 Los Angeles title game.
So now when I wash dishes, it is a race against the clock. How
many can I dry in one minute?
By the way, touching half-eaten food on plates and forks is so
gross it makes me want to throw up all over the plates, but then a
voice within my soul says, “Duh, Daniel, that barf would make
them even dirtier.” But then a devil on my left shoulder
tells me it would be cool and says I should throw up. But then I
don’t throw up because an angel on my right shoulder tells me
that it would be stupid to barf.
Taking out trash is now a strong man competition. How much trash
am I able to lift? On a side note, it is totally nuts how much
trash we create. Man is really wasteful and that is why we destroy
the rain forest and dinosaurs. I love dinosaurs. Just yesterday, on
the way back from Costco (where I got some lovely mini spinach
quiches on sale) I looked out of the car window and glancing at a
nearby hill remarked, “How cool would it be if there were
dinosaurs just running all over that hill?”
Cooking is the toughest sport of them all. You have to cut stuff
and try to decide if your provisions are rotten. Actually, my
roommates and I eat a lot of rotten stuff. One of my
roommates’ dads is a doctor, and he says you can eat a lot of
rancid stuff and not get sick. So, in the past two days I have
eaten three things with mold on them: Brie cheese, cherries and an
onion.
Cooking is like figure skating because it merges creativity with
athleticism. For example, I used a half-eaten piece of fowl to make
a chicken taco, which I garnished with a tomato and some pepper
jack cheese.
We haven’t cleaned our bathroom, and we haven’t
vacuumed either. I’m flippin’ out for sure.
But even now, I am sitting on a futon on our sun-drenched patio,
and we are barbequing portabella mushroom and steaks, and I feel
like I just kicked a goal.