candystaples replied to your post “ok I'm very into this idea ok - Joe. what are the things you are good...”
I'm very sorry, I read this out loud to someone and they thought it was funny - penance???????????????????????????????????
Amanda, your claim has been reviewed and you will be happy to hear that your penance has been damn accepted.
I was thinking about cooking some more and I thought of something else.
This one time in undergrad, I had to take some summer courses if I wanted enough credits to graduate in 4 years, mostly because I fucked up freshman year by partying (staying in a room with a few other losers and smoking pot all the time) too much. So I had this horrid summer where I stayed on the mostly empty campus in my closet-sized dorm room for almost all of the three-month break and got high off a gravity bong all the time, which is an awful way to get high. It is no fun. You just get way too high all at once and then have to wait for your heart to stop racing and your vision to stop throbbing before you you can enjoy it. I also got a part-time job doing security for my building, sitting in a glass box a hair smaller than my closet-ish door room. I was so bad at security I got a reputation in my short time there as the guy with the dark hair who swiped everybody in without question.
I didn’t see or speak to many people and went a bit crazy. I’ve been crazy a long time, but that was perhaps my craziest? I got some anxiety and stuff, felt like shit. Wow, it was cool.
Anyway, you’d think I’d want to hang out with whoever I could but, oh my no, one still must have one’s standards because, let me tell you, my weed supplier for that summer was this other guy named Joe and he was a phenomenally boring human being. Just an unfairly boring man, like, how could he. How dare he be that boring? Amanda, he dared.
You know how in college your weed dealer is invariably just some other student who wanted to make some money and they’re not like a real drug dealer who has better things to do, who has a business to run, so they come to your room and give you the weed but then they hang around and get high with you whether you want them to or not? Yeah, well.
One time Joe sold me some weed and then hung out in my baby apartment with me and we got unfun high off my disgusting gravity bong. And then he just sat there being boring and saying boring things. He picked up my guitar at one point and started playing very technical, fiddly song covers on it, like people who are douches and can play the guitar always do. And I have pretty big gaps in classic rock and pop knowledge (especially classic rock cuz it BLOWS) so he’d play these songs and he’d stare into my eyes while playing them, waiting for some recognition that never came. One of them he goes, “you’ll know this one.” Amanda, I did not.
It was very uncomfortable, especially as I was over-high and cooped up in a small space with this man. Anyway, onto the cooking. This is a cooking story.
At some point, boring bastard that he was, his concept of good conversation turned to cooking. He started talking about pasta. I don’t know why. I don’t know what prompted it. Very probably nothing prompted it, he was just a boring rambling type. Not like me, who is interesting and succinct.
He told me all about this fucking pasta he makes. I don’t remember what kind. I feel like it was a very basic pasta, like bolognese or something. Look, I’ve made a bolognese, okay? Maybe I hadn’t at that point in my life, but I did later, so whatever. Amanda, this is another pasta I’ve made, I forgot to mention it last time.
So, if I’m honest, the only part of this I really remember is there was a moment he was talking about the pot you make the sauce in or the water you boil the pasta in--one of those. He was just staring at me, I’m high as a blasted kite, miserable as hell, and a bit crazy in this tiny room with this boring prick. He stares at me and he says of the water or the sauce or whatever, “and you don’t throw that out. You stiirrrr it in” and as he says it he’s miming stirring the fuckin bowl, pretending to cradle the bowl with one hand (which you probably wouldn’t even do irl, what the fuck?) and doing the stirring motion with the other hand. Can you believe it? I honestly could not. I could not believe I was being told how to cook pasta in this shitty little dorm room, high as a fuck. I had no kitchen on this campus. Nobody did. Why are you telling me how to cook pasta now? Is this what life is meant to be? Fucking hell.
Amanda, I died a thousand and one deaths that day. I stared at him, shocked, pure shocked I was hearing this. I mean, you tell me you made a good pasta, hey, great, I’m happy for you, I guess, now shut up. But you’re telling me how to make it? Your goddamn process? Why the fuck do you think I would care? I am not sure but my mouth genuinely may have fallen open. It may really have been agape watching this guy. I remember thinking it felt like my mouth was open because I was truly stunned. Stunned to death by this boredom.
The irony of this is that this was so boring it became a memorable, incredible experience I will never forget. Isn’t it strange how these things work?
Anyway, that is the day I turned against cooking. That’s not true but it sounds like a good origin story. I hope this advice will help you, Amanda, in the coming days.
