Bad Dates—We've all had them

Part 1:

 First Date in College
First dates are always extremely exciting.  There's something fantastic about first dates, you're all worried and you don't even like the guy, and you're so excited when he comes to pick you up, and you've tried on twenty different outfits and have pants and shirts littered across your bedroom floor.  Yes, dates.  Wow.

This date surprised me as I wasn't expecting to be asked out.  My friend Mitch called me and I missed the phone call.  So later that night I called him back.

Me: Hey Mitch what's up?

Him: Not much, what have you been up to?

Me: School, homework, school, textbooks, classes.  (Yes, most of what I did as a freshman was study and burn food).

Him: That's cool.

Me, after a long pause: So you called me?

Revenge of the Roommate: Cuddling

 My roommate and I are rather strange girls.  You should know that we have been friends for a very long time, we went to high-school together, went to college together as freshmen, and are still roommates now.  People sometimes miss take us for siblings just because of how casual and comfortable we are around each other.  There have been nights where we've huddled down under blankets and fallen asleep on the couch together watching late night movies, and we have so many inside jokes that it's not even funny to anyone but us anymore. 

Needless to say we are close.

This changed a little when I got my first boyfriend.   Actually it was before I got my first boyfriend (we'll call him Gus), I non-dated him for about eight months before we actually started steady dating—aka he was just over at our apartment ALL THE TIME.

Vegtables

One of my mother's goals in life was to convert me to the zealous love of vegetables.  This goal went on unsuccessfully for years, as I stubbornly refused to love vegetables, and she stubbornly continued to feed them to me anyways.

I Hate Peas
The first way I tried to avoid eating my vegetables was to stuff every single pea or cubed carrot she put onto my plate into my mouth all at once.  Then I would sit and chew, and chew, and chew . .  . and chew.  I think all the chewing has something to do with stuffing so many vegetables into a rather small mouth, and my not wanting to swallow them.  After what seemed like hours I would finally turn to my mother and ask if I could use the bathroom.  Then I would go spit out all the mushed up peas and carrots and flush them down the toilet—I would then return to happily devour all the rest of my cold food.

The saddest part of this story is that I did not fool my parents.  They knew exactly what I was doing with the vegetables in my mouth—not really a hard deduction when I left with a mouth brimming with soggy vegetables and returned with it empty.  They let me do it because they felt sorry for me—I really did spend hours chewing those stupid peas and carrots!

De La Sauce of Garlic

I believe we have all made different cooking mistakes before.  Even great chefs like me make a very few mistakes.  I remember once I tried to branch out my baking abilities and decided not to use a recipe to make cookies (I think most of this inspiration came from being too lazy to go look up a recipe, yes, I can be that lazy).  Cookies have a specific texture that is created from a certain amount of butter and eggs and flour—a texture which I did not get right.  My cookies turned out half cookie and half sweet biscuit and when my roommate got home and tried one she couldn't decide what they were supposed to be.  I have since learned to use recipes when I attempt making cookies.

I also once made a batch of brownies (while using a recipe) without putting any flour in them.  How did I do this?  I'm not sure.  I put in what I thought was all the ingredients, mixed up the batter put it in a pan, and cooked it.  I didn't realize anything was wrong until the brownies never cooked into brownies and the toothpick never came out clean.  At this point my mother sat me down and grilled me.

That Girl is on Fire

It is sad, although perhaps not at all strange, that people burn themselves quite frequently when working with ovens and stove ranges and steamers.  For the first few months of my job in a hot kitchen I burned my arms so frequently that I had constant scars all across them.  I never told my manager that I burned myself, rather I'd ignore the burn, pretend it wasn't very bad, and continue working—which may be part of the reason for all the scaring.

I'm not sure why I had such a hard time telling my boss I'd burned myself, I suppose it made me feel vulnerable or stupid, or clumsy.  I remember one particular day I tried picking up a pan that I had just taken out of the oven—tried to pick it up with my bare hand that is.  How do I explain that burn to my kitchen manager?  "I forgot I'd just taken it out of the oven."  "I didn't realize it would burn me."  "I forgot that pans coming right out of the oven could burn you." . . . none of these reasons seemed like very good options, so I went along with my default plan and didn't tell anyone about it.  I got off work shortly afterwards, bought a small cup of ice-cream and drove home holding it between my burnt fingers to keep them from hurting.  By the time I got home the ice-cream was melted and my hand was starting to hurt again—but my boss never knew, which was the entire point of the ordeal.

Fairy Tale

I think when we are children we all believe, to a certain extent, in impossible things.  We think unicorns or dragoons are real, we secretly know that monsters live in our basement, or brownies live beneath the floor boards.  When I was little I decided that I wanted a fairy for a pet.  Although the idea of a fairy sitting in a bird cage seems a little inhumane now, at the time this was my perfect vision of a pet fairy.  I believe it was brought on by watching Peter Pan.  Unfortunately I never found my fairy and I never went so far as to buy a birdcage for it so I wouldn't have known what to do with it if I had caught one.

Some of us are a little more fanciful in our imaginings.  One of my friends would go build small fairy dwellings in the forest for the fairies to live in.  She set up many different rules for herself, the houses had to be made only of natural material (rocks, twigs, grass, leaves), perhaps the most important rule was that once the houses were complete, she could never return to them.  For if a fairy moved into the house and then the human returned . . . it would ruin the illusion that fairies existed?  It would anger them and they would leave?  The magic of the place would be broken and the faeries would disappear?  No one knows why you could never return.

The story I would like to tell today does not involve magic, but a very great deal of imagination.  One of my friend's has six children, all of them girls.  Two of his younger daughters liked to build fairy furniture for a fairy they believed lived in their house.  They would set up clean little tissue paper beds and fancy chairs and cushions made out of cotton balls for the fairies.  A little while after the girls had made the furniture a note would appear next to it, thanking them for the beautiful chairs and beds.  An occasional note from a fairy was all the incentive they needed, they made furniture almost every day.