Can You Smell My Melons?

I came home after going to go see a movie with my friend when I noticed that something in my apartment stunk, and what it stunk of, I wasn’t quite sure. While it smelled a bit ripe, I also smelled something that was akin to rotting meat and the smells of tissue cultures from back when I worked in a lab that had monkey kidney cells growing.  I have always had a relatively strong sense of smell. So much so that I can go to the bathroom after somebody and am able to smell what their last meal has been, with extreme detail. So that being said, rather pungent odors really bother me: candles, incense, perfume, cologne, and Cambodian food.

I sniffed about my apartment to see what it could be coming from, and after smelling the trash can, the garbage disposal, the unplugged fridge that is dwelling in my living room, the new fridge that was just installed, and finally I came to start smelling some fruit that I had left out to ripen on my counter.

I had bought a lovely bunch of melons earlier in the week. Why I decided I needed more melons in my life, I can’t be sure, but I still felt the need to buy as many melons as I could possibly eat within the next week. The problem was that I didn’t know how to pick out a good melon, and so I loaded up my cart with the most symmetrical melons I could find, and I went to find an employee who could tell me which melons I should buy.

The first employee I could find was working the sample booth, and when I asked him how I could find a good melon, he replied, “You have to smell it. You want the ones that smell melon-y.” I haven’t purchased a melon in years, let alone sniffed one, so I picked up two of my melons out of the stack in my cart and reached over the sneeze guard of the sample table to have him sniff my melons. But sneeze guards are put up for reasons, and he scolded me for reaching over, possibly contaminating all of the food he just set up. Embarrassed, I loaded up my melons and searched the aisles for another employee.

“I’m sorry, can you sniff my melons?” is not a question that should be asked to a stranger, but after being rather coy about it with three employees, I was done beating around the bush, and I was ready for somebody to tell me which of my melons were best. The produce stocker told me that he preferred to knock on melons to see if they were ripe, and after he knocked on a few, he found one that he especially liked. After turning it around in his hands, he brought it slowly up to his ear and shook it gently. “This is the one. It’ll be good for four days.” He passed me back my melon, and the melon whisperer went back to stacking produce.

Intimidated by the melon, I left it out for a few days so that I could find out how to cut up melons, but then I had left it in a spot where the sun shone in, and maybe that would throw off the melon’s juju, the ripeness prophecy that I had received from the soothsayer of melon.  Lazy as I am, I decided to ignore it and I would deal with it the next day and by the time I got to it, the melon possibly could have been the offender.

I cut into the melon the day after to see if it had rotted, but instead, it just seemed rather juicy and fresh. I ate a slice, and then another, but there was no rot to be found. And even after I had disposed of my melon, my apartment still stunk of death and chemical solvent. What could this smell be? It would be my luck that a rat would have made its way into my new cabinets while my kitchen was being refurbished, getting sealed into a crevice, and dying.

Lazy again, I decided to take a nap whilst airing out my apartment, thinking that maybe it was some awful gas cloud that had descended upon my dwelling, and I fell asleep quick, and hard; the hard sleep that you get where you have no dreams and you don’t move. And then I was slapped in the face by the smell, more pungent than ever.

After evacuating my apartment, I turned and saw a shell on my neighbor’s countertop and I knew instantly what it was: durian. And when I walked up a little closer, I could see that my neighbors also had two more durian, wrapped up in a towel in their apartment. My hoarding, Asian neighbors were now starting to collect durian, and I saw my life flash before my eyes.

If you are unfamiliar with durian, it is a fruit from Southeast Asia that has a spiny outside, which is supposed to be the sweetest fruit that you will ever eat. But this fruit is banned by most hotels and public places because of its stench that stains everything in sight, leaving anything in its path to smell like meat, and death, and skunk. The stench is so bad that I can tell if a grocery store carries durian by just standing at the door. And that is how powerful the stench is when unopened. But when durian is cracked open, the smell increases tenfold.

I already hate my downstairs, Asian neighbors, and so I decided to let them know that I would not be okay with them eating durian under my apartment. I stood at the doorway and yelled into the apartment, trying to get one to come out, and the old, Asian woman that I had taken into my apartment one cold night came from the back bedroom. She gave me a greasy smile that was literally greasy due to the durian, and after I told her that she couldn’t keep any more durian, she just smiled and closed the door. I feel as though she plans on continuing to eat the vile fruit.

It Doesn't Pay to be Decent

I would like to consider myself a good person: I say hello to my neighbors, I let people merge in front of me whilst in traffic, I try not to talk on the phone in public. But the problem with being a decent person is that the more decent you are, the more people expect you to be decent to them. It starts with something as small as a wave, and then a hello, and then small talk at the mailbox, and then you are expected to pick up your neighbor’s newspaper whilst he is out of town (nevermind you also being out of town, so you drive hither and yon to make sure your neighbor’s newspaper is properly hidden). It all stems from my inability to say no to requests. While I have developed the ability to say no to my sister when she requests ludicrous things, I have a hard time turning down others’ requests.

And so I was driving back from my parents’ home in San Jacinto. And while we are relatively close to one another, I still have to drive a very dangerous mountain pass to get to from their place to mine. This is an easy feat when wide awake, and well rested, but after staying late at my parents’ home so that I can watch a TV show, and sleeping on a couch, I had difficulties staying awake.

After making my way through the canyon, I finally made it back to my apartment where I was more than excited to instantly pass out into the loving embrace of my bed (it does have an embrace due to the fact that my bed used to be my parents’ and there is an indent of where my father used to sleep. This indent is inescapable, and sucks me into it no matter how hard I resist).

After getting my things from my truck, I started to walk over to my apartment where I see a small figure darting around the stairwell, hiding behind my neighbor’s barbecue. My initial thought was that it was one of the neighborhood kids experimenting with pot under my apartment, but as I came closer, the child like figure started to look older. She was hunched over, and would peek her head out from behind the stairs, like she was expecting somebody.

My mother had already scared me earlier about strangers in poorly lit places. And while I made no big deal of her urgings of me finding a gas station with proper lighting, I now was scared that my mother had predicted that I would be confronted in the dark, and promptly mugged for all that I had on me: two pairs of dirty jeans, a T-shirt, a phone, and my moccasins. I was about ready to run up the stairs to my apartment and quickly unlock my door, just moments before the stranger could catch me and decapitate me, when I realized that the person hiding behind the stairs was my downstairs, Asian neighbor.

She came up to me and asked for my phone, explaining that her son had left her there with her bags inside the apartment, so she didn’t have her keys and she had been locked outside for an hour already, where she had made refuge from the wind behind the stairs and was resourceful enough to use the neighbor’s barbecue as a heat source. I gave her my phone and when she saw that I was going to wait there for my phone, she turned the other direction and started speaking Cantonese so I wouldn’t understand what was going on. But from what I heard, she was going to be stuck outside another half hour because her son was at Costco. She gave me back my phone, and I thought that maybe I would do the right thing and invite her up to my apartment, but then I was too tired to care anymore, said I was sorry for her plight, and left her in the bitter cold.

And this is where I damn my parents for teaching me to be a decent person. Because I went upstairs, hopped into my pajamas, laid down, and I couldn’t sleep because I couldn’t stop thinking about my Asian neighbor. The very neighbor whose son plays loud music constantly, that floods my apartment. The neighbor that cooks the smelliest of fish, that permeates my walls. The neighbor that smokes constantly, so that my apartment smells like an ashtray. Angry at myself for having a conscience, I looked outside to see that she was still locked out.

I went downstairs and before I could even offer for her to come up into my apartment, she was already up the stairs. “Do you have tea? I would like some tea very much.” She then plopped down on my futon and started feeling around in her pockets for something. Distracted, trying to prepare tea for this stranger, I didn’t realize that she was pulling out her cigarettes, and when I looked over at her to ask what kind of tea she wanted, I saw that she was trying to light up.

“Oh, you can’t smoke in here. I don’t smoke.” She looked at me and cocked her head to the side like she didn’t understand what I was saying. “I don’t smoke. You can’t smoke in my apartment.”
This was the beginnings of her frustrations with me. “But it smells like smoke in here. You quitting?” It’s surprising that I could even understand what she was saying, being that she had a very heavy accent that was not made clearer by the cigarette that she still had inbetween her lips.

“No, the apartment just smells like smoke because all of the neighbor’s smoke. Maybe even the last tenant, too. But you just can’t smoke in here.” She took the cigarette out and just held it in her hands for a second. before crushing it into a little tobacco ball, which she then held out for me to come and get, and then throw away. I never knew that Asians could be such drama queens, but this Asian certainly was. A diva, even.

I brought her a teacup with water and then put out all the tea bags I had in my possession. She looked over each one, then opened them, one by one, and smelled them. “These aren’t tea. Do you have tea?” I looked at her, confused, not because she said that I didn’t give her tea, but because she was making such a fuss in a stranger’s home, who through the generosity of his heart, let a poor, cold, old stranger into his home and tried to make her comfortable.

“That’s all I got. I just drink herbal tea.” She looked back at the tea bags, scrunched her bratty, little Asian face, and put her teacup on the side table. This would have been enough to let me know that she no longer wanted tea, but with her love for dramatic flair, she decided to then push the teacup to the far side of table, until it was the furthest possible distance away from her.

Completely fed up with her disregard for my saintly generosity, I decided I would call up the apartment managers and get them to come out and unlock her door because I was apt to kick this woman down the stairs of my apartment, where her son would find her broken at the base of the stairs.

The apartment managers informed me that there would be a fee that my neighbor would have to pay, and when I told my neighbor that, she said that she would prefer to just wait than pay five dollars to get into her apartment. And so I relayed the message to the management company. It may not have been the right message, but I relayed a message back to them. “Yeah, her pills are inside of the apartment, and she is feeling a little faint, think you could just let her in without the fee, because she doesn’t have money to pay it. I really don’t want her to pass out in my apartment without her pills.” Reluctant, they said they would be down in a few minutes to unlock her door. And the moment they hung up the phone was the moment that I kicked that Asian out of my apartment, locked the door, and went fast asleep.

I lied, I felt anger, and I may have called her mean names under my breath when I was ushering her out, but I have learned my lesson: when you try to be a decent human being, you receive no reward and must deal with mean, indecent people who don’t appreciate your generosity or tea.

Sustenance

What’s your favorite food? You think that I would be asked a more specific and constant question than that when faced to pay my cable bill. But no. In order for me to log in and pay my bill, I have to remember what my favorite food is from six months ago. And of course, while I have to think about what my favorite food is, that means I must also eat; It’s science.

So while munching on assorted chips, I tried to figure out what my favorite food is. Olives? I really like olives, but do I like them enough to use them as a security question? And so I started with olives. And then OLIVES. And then OLIV3S. But my favorite food wasn’t olives.

I blame the cable company for my late bill. I really do try to pay on time, but making me jump through hoops like this? Well, they are begging for a late payment. If I knew six months ago that I would be quizzed on the most random personal questions about myself, I probably would have written down the answers, or not created them while under the influence of a double shot of NyQuil. But that’s in the past now.

I started abusing NyQuil when I was at university. My roommates didn’t take the early bird approach to school like I did, and so midnight would come around, I would go to bed, and my roommates would blast Family Guy for an hour. After ear plugs, white noise, and anger didn’t work, I switched to the hard stuff. And then I got hooked on the hard stuff. I would keep a bottle hidden behind one of the cinder blocks that I used to boost my bed to a towering height, and every night, I would take a swig to send myself off to sleep.

That wasn’t the first time that I was addicted to a sleep aide, but I had been cold turkey from Tylenol PM from the time that I was ten or so. What’s a little nip here and there to take the edge off? I wasn’t striving for sobriety. I just wanted a little sleep. And so I night capped myself to sleep for half a year, and then my addiction started breaking the bank. Without poverty, I would probably be in a rehab somewhere, smelling of Vicks44 or off brand cold suppressants. But now I have learned control, and will only buy when I am sick. And if I don’t finish the bottle when I’m sick, I will finish the bottle out of longing.

Could it be grilled cheese? I really like grilled cheese. But mostly only the cheese. Cheese. CHEESE. CH33S3. Nope. Still not the password. But then I felt like I should nibble a bit off the block of cheddar that I had in the fridge. It’s just sitting there and I don’t have much purpose for it. And grabbed the block and just started gnawing at the corners.

At this point, I was locked out of making any more guesses at what my favorite food was, and so I turned on some old cooking videos of Julia Child on YouTube to pass the time. At one point of my loneliness, I would talk to myself whilst cooking, impersonating Julia Child. The moments weren’t ever my proudest, but I wasn’t so lonely afterward. And then I remembered how much butter I used during my “Cooking with Julia” sessions. I then tried signing on with my iPod. Butter. BUTTER. BUTT3R. Nothing.

Out came the frying pan and a slab of butter. And of course, if I am frying anything, it would be an egg. FriedEggs. FRIEDEGGS. FRI3D3GGS. Still nothing. And now I had dripped egg yolk on my computer. Not that I mind too much because my computer needs to die so I can replace her. So I’ve been known to drink my apple juice over her, slightly hoping that a stray drop will kill the thing. AppleJuice. APPLEJUICE. APPL3JUIC3. I went to bed with all of my bills paid but my cable bill.

Driving to work, I had completely forgotten my cable bill woes. Mostly because I was now distracted with trying to eat a Pop Tart on the way to work. Most days I love a Pop Tart, but this one was chalky and tasted like sin. “The only reason I am eating you is just for basic sustenance.” And then I knew what my favorite food was six months ago. I rolled down the window, “Sustenance! It’s sustenance!” Which now, I am certain I looked like an idiot to all of the morning joggers, but I didn’t care, because I love sustenance. And now I can pay my bill.

Drive

Something about flashing red and blue lights brings out all of my anxiety disorders in a flurry: I feel the need to vomit, I believe that I have cancer, I start to pull out my hair, I find myself ugly, and my neck begins to twitch. This makes it all the harder to get myself out of a ticket, especially because police officers have no pity for red, twitching men, who are pulling out their hair whilst amid a flop sweat. And that is what I am reduced to: an entire mess.

I have been driving for years (legally, five years and a week, but illegally, longer that that). And I have always been pretty okay at it besides when I first started driving and I mistook the brake for the gas and almost ran my father’s truck through a warehouse wall (first time he cursed at me) or when my lanyard wrapped my foot to my accelerator and so I wasn’t able to use the brake (second time my father cursed at me).

Out of my siblings, I would consider myself one of the better drivers of the bunch, not that my siblings are bad drivers, but I do have friends that have sworn they have had multiple near death experiences while my sister was behind the wheel—in the same car ride. My brother, of course, was also known to be an amateur street racer through high school, where he would race to and from the local pizza shop for lunch.

Living in Utah really did wonders for my driving, and that is where I learned how to drive in snow. Nobody taught me really, but I taught myself, whilst driving down the freeway to pick my roommate up from the airport. It wasn’t snowy in Provo, so I didn’t expect it to be treacherous in Salt Lake City, but of course I was wrong.

I started getting nervous around the time that I couldn’t see anything out of my windows besides a sea of white. Trying to be a cautious driver, I decided that reducing my speed would be a good decision, so I tapped on my brakes, which did nothing for my speed, but did make my brakes grind against the pedal. Determined, I tried again, keeping my foot on the brake with much gusto, which in the snow makes you fish tail wildly out of control.  I was never told what to do in that situation. I didn’t know you are supposed to turn into the curve. I was oblivious to the fact that after your car spins out, the engine dies. And I definitely didn’t know how to cope with the oncoming traffic that I could see coming at me. So what I did was roll down my window and throw up.

I am still the only sibling to have not hit any animals whilst driving, although that is not for lack of trying on the animals’ part. They seem attracted to my wheel wells, as if they are just too depressed with life and just want to end it under the tire of my dinky, little truck. Most times I swerve away, refusing to be the Kevorkian to a rabbit, a possum, a cat, a squirrel.

My first time seeing an owl was when I nearly hit one in the middle of the road, driving amidst the fog. After seeing a strange tumble weed in the road, I started to merge over, only to notice that the tumbleweed was not what it originally resembled, but was actually an owl, which I only missed by a few feet. What was an owl doing in the middle of the road; wings drooped at its side, head winding back and forth? Trying to kill itself, that’s what.

Now, I am no saint at driving, and received two speeding tickets within two weeks of each other when I first moved up to Utah. And while both speeding tickets, I still believe are unjust, I paid them anyway. I am also notorious for texting while driving, and the occasional road rage, but I have never been ticketed in any occasion that actually warranted a ticket. The first ticket, I was lost in the middle of nowhere after my exit was blocked off on the freeway. My second ticket occurred when I didn’t slow down quickly enough from a commercial to a residential zone (I had already made it through a roundabout and almost a second one before the cop turned on his lights). And my third occurred whilst hanging up my phone while driving.

I don’t enjoy speaking on the phone. I actually detest it to be honest. I sound like Snagglepuss, I get nervous, and I was scarred as a child because I was always mistaken as my mother when I answered the phone. But because I love my family, I call them almost daily, on my car ride from work. But I do so with my phone on speaker, tucked into my visor, which I consider to be hands free. I had a quick conversation with my mother, grabbed my phone to hang up, tucked my phone into my crotch, and that is when I saw the lights in my rearview mirror. And that is when I receive the flop sweat of woe.

Working Out Isn't Working Out

I blame my aunt Shawna. She has made me so paranoid about my health by posting a PSA on her Facebook that might as well had said, “Jacob Broderick, you are going to die from malignant melanoma. Sucks that you don’t have health insurance, doesn’t it?” Why do I feel so paranoid about getting malignant melanoma? Well, the PSA listed several things that increase your chances of developing the cancer: have more than fifty moles? Cancer! Been severely sunburned, ever? Cancer! Have you ever gone outside? Cancer!

I have fifty moles on my left leg, let alone my whole body; I usually lose count at about one hundred and forty. And living in California, and being pale, I get burned every time I step out into the sun. So if I calculate it out correctly, my chances of developing skin cancer are at about two hundred and forty percent.  So the only thing that will really battle my anxiety is working out. That or eating, but the latter I have done the past three months and have started to work my way back to being the fat sibling.

So I have started to regularly attend the gym to get my Zumba on three times a week. The problem is, there are so many people that attend the classes that they have to give out tickets to let you in. If you arrive thirty minutes early for the class, you are assured to have a ticket number higher than 60, which banishes you to the very far back of the classroom, or behind one of the gigantic mirrored pillars in the middle of the room. I can’t be pushed to the back of the class, because then how would people admire my dancing? And so I come to class nearly an hour early, which gets me somewhere between ticket 30 and 40.

The most embarrassing part is asking for a Zumba ticket, because the front attendants at the gym look at me like I am confused or something. Is he serious about a Zumba ticket? Maybe if I laugh, he’ll laugh and go away… they laugh, I repeat myself, and they give me a resounding, “Yeah! Work it out, big guy!”

So with my free hour of gym time I usually wander around the cardio room and try to look like I am working out. At first, I started using the elliptical. The problem here is that the elliptical doesn’t allow me to have a good stride with my run, and it makes me look like I am trotting along, gaily through the air. I feel as if I should hold a basket of posies while I am on the elliptical, like that would make me seem more in place.

After I swore off that machine, I decided to start using the stair climber, but yet again, my size has worked against me. This time, it would be my big clodhoppers that I call my feet; they don’t fit on the steps. Three quarters or a half a foot, I could do, but I am essentially using my toes to stay aloft on the machine, which brings me back, looking like a pansy, skipping up an infinite flight of stairs. And from this, I generate an infinite amount of stares that make me feel a little bit too self-conscious.  

I’ve found that my best option comes in the form of the rowing machine. Hardly anyone notices them because they are pushed to the very back of the gym, the outcasts of the machines. So I like to spend a little bit of time, rowing in place while listening to an audio book. But after constant rowing for ten minutes, my muscles start to scream, and I end up just pushing myself forward an back on the seat, accomplishing little to know physical activity.

The only other machine that I really use would be the stationary bike, which is conveniently placed right in front of the televisions. I usually end up in front of the ESPN television, which makes me look and feel more masculine, not that I am actually paying attention the game, but nobody has to know that.

From my biking perch, I start to make judgements about the people around me, mostly the people working with weights. Truly, I wish that I could lift weights, but because I am embarrassingly weak, I would never use a weight machine in front of another human being. Somehow, benching ten pounds is worse than not being able to bench at all. Because that is what gyms are about: extremes. Either you are so incredibly muscled that you can lift a car with ease, or you are a weak little fatty who works out, but will never really accomplish anything.

Even if I could lift more than ten pounds, I don’t really know how to use any of the machines. Sure, I could hop on and start pushing and pulling things until they move, but I am certain that every gym goer there would look at me and pass judgements, just like how I do to the people I watch.

I find myself staring over at the free weights, and start to wonder, I wonder if there is a sure fire way to look at somebody an know they are on steroids? I know that if I had to examine them naked, I could probably figure out who was a steroid user and who was just magnificently buff, but from a distance, I can only assume that most are juicers. The ones that I really target are the men with gigantic chests but tiny little legs. Because they look freakish and disproportionate, they must be using steroids.

I would probably use steroids if I actually had enough drive to actually lift weights. Mostly because I have never really had a great body. I mean, every once and a while, I get really skinny and you can see some ribs, but that usually only happens after I have the flu and haven’t kept any fluids down for a week. I would love to have some sort of definition in my shape, a bicep here, an oblique there, but by myself, I know I will never achieve that kind of figure.

I consider myself somewhat lucky. While being fat has left me with a hooded belly button and stretch marks, I was also blessed with skin that stretched where my manboobs once resided, which now give the illusion that I have the inkling of pecs. I know they aren’t real, but women hardly have real breasts anymore, why can’t I have pecs made from my own sagging skin? It sounds disgusting in theory, but in real life, you’d never really know-- unless, that is, somebody touches them or asks me to lift something heavy.

Instead of steroids, I could cut out all the hard work and heavy lifting, and go in for plastic surgery. My list of operations I would like to get is staggering: butt implants, botox injections, ear pinning, belly button augmentation, liposculpture, tummy tuck, pec implants, veneers, etc. And that is why I can’t ever go in for surgery; I would never come out. Which is frightening to think that if I get just one surgery, I could become addicted and pop out looking like Dolly Parton.

Untitled

I’m going to try to start blogging more regularly again. Not that it is my New Year’s resolution or anything, because I don’t make goals, or even have goals for that matter. I am just glad when I haven’t died throughout the day or that I haven’t had to deal with too many used condoms at work. Besides that, I am goalless, which isn’t much of a surprise.

It’s not that I am anti-goal, it’s just that I have learned that when I do have a goal, the universe decides that it will do everything in its power to smite my pathetic goal to the ground: Cooking a goose? Smoted. Having health insurance? Smoted. Finding correctly fitting pants? Smoted, and then laughed at for having highwaters (I know that smoted isn’t the proper conjugation, but I prefer smoted to smote, get off my back).

So instead, I take a more passive role, and let the universe decide where I will end up in life. Which at the moment, would be living alone in a cockroach infested apartment, while I work as a permanent temp, without cable or many friends, and I can be content with that, as long as the universe decides to move me along sometime soon.

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On the topic of my apartment, the bathroom has begun weeping nicotine from its walls. I used to think that I wasn’t using the ventilation long enough, after my morning shower, but my mother told me that yellow seepage is a sign that the past tenant was a smoker. To me, it just looks like my bathroom has syphilis. I was rather fine with this until the bathroom wept nicotine into my eyeball whilst sitting atop the toilet, which temporarily blinded me and made it so difficult to finish my business. There was a lot of groaning, and stomping, and I prayed that the next door neighbor wouldn’t come by to see if I was ok.

Last time she came by, I was cursing the god of bread and she wanted to make sure I was ok. I looked like an idiot for having a tantrum over mold, and then I looked like a bigger idiot when I called her, “Pepper,” because that is what I thought her husband called her. Now that I think of it, many husbands call their wives, “sweet cheeks,” but that doesn’t give me the right to address them as such.

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I have gotten back into the swing of Zumba after being fired from my gym and packing on twelve pounds. To my Asian coworkers, they are amazed that twelve pounds doesn’t show too much on me, but if I was five foot, like them, I am sure I would have to start breaking out my fat clothes again. And while I did like teaching Zumba for three months, the gym I taught at was skuzzy, and I say that in the nicest way possible. The gym owner was crude, looked like he had taken too many steroids at multiple times in his life, and made fun of my class on a regular basis. He wonders why more people didn’t show up.  I wouldn’t show up either if a pervy, juice head made fun of the class while watching from the door. And then I remember I did show up. For three months. Three times a week.

Whatever, I’m not bitter. I hope that that gym flourishes. I hope nothing but the best for the owner whose head is four sizes too small for his body. I hope nothing but the best for the whore of a receptionist, who thinks that undressing in the lobby will make patrons want to lose more weight. I hope nothing but the best for their patrons, who still aren’t losing weight thanks to the tutelage of the “nutritional specialist” who is a good forty pounds overweight.

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I’ve never really had a big craving for meat ever. This could be because my mother was a vegetarian for years, and I am poor and don’t buy meat because it is expensive. I take that back. I’m just cheap. I live off of off brand granola bars, cereal, and sandwiches, which is living rich in comparison to what I ate when I lived in Utah: canned refried beans, rice, and more refried beans. But as of late, I have craved the taste of flesh, and cannot stop thinking about it. This could be from my failed attempt to cook a goose, where I looked for months and then found out that I would have to shell out between ninety and one hundred and thirty dollars just for the bird. I am depressed and desperate enough for a forty dollar bird, sure, but I don’t think that I am anywhere near wallowing in a fatty depression, where I can spend that much money without really caring about the consequences.

This has made it so that I have started buying the cheapest meat I can buy, which is usually one hour from expiring, and the weirdest cut of meat that one could imagine. The most recent of my cooking endeavors happened after working out and I realized that if I did not have flesh of the beast, I would crumple up and die. So going to the store, the cheapest thing I could find was a package with two, “half breasts of chicken with rib and skin.” Along with the skin, was a few feathers, but it was kosher, and I felt like obeying the Law of Moses.

 Because I don’t really have a plethora of cooking tools, nor ingredients, I placed the meat atop a roasting rack formed of eyeballed potatoes, slathered it in as much oil and kosher salt as I could, and then threw on some cayenne pepper with an unenthusiastic, “bam.” With the amount of salt I added, it was as if I was about to pickle the chicken, which reminds me of pickled pig’s feet, which reminds me of preserved parasites in formaldehyde.  I threw the chicken in the oven and then wedged myself into my sardine can tub.

Cooking has a weird effect on feathers. They stand straight up and brown up a little bit so you really can’t ignore them. It actually looked like the chicken decided to shave right before it was slaughtered, and it had developed five o’ clock shadow by the time it made it out of the oven. I looked at the feathers, and then considered my options. I could either pull off the skin and not eat it, or I could stop caring and embrace the inner Native American of my soul. Pass the peace pipe and call me Squanto.

Christmas Meltdown

I am not a big fan of Christmas, and don’t really ever plan on being a big fan of Christmas. Most of the time, I am too busy being a scrooge about people starting the holidays too soon, and the next thing I know, Christmas is two days away and I still have five people to shop for. This completely ruins my holiday, and I usually just give up on shopping, settling with a DVD box set for my father that he will never watch. My general rules for Christmas are simple: don’t play Christmas songs until two weeks before Christmas, don’t ask me to go caroling, and don’t sing Christmas songs at me. I don’t think I am asking too much with these rules, but of course I am labeled “Scrooge” the day after Thanksgiving when I say, “It’s not Christmas yet.”

But this year, I was off to a better start, mostly because I was given an advent calendar. I never had one before, and the daily shot of cheap, molded chocolate made it so that I was less likely to snap at a rule breaker when he or she decided to sing “Jingle Bell Rock” in my general direction. I kept the calendar propped up against the wall on my stove, and each day, I would wake up, open the door on my calendar, eat my crappy chocolate, and leave for work, prepared to face the holidays. 

This went well enough for about ten days, until I got the biggest craving for tater tots I have ever had in my life. Back in Provo, I was lucky enough to have a roommate who was addicted to tater tots and fast food. And so every week or so, we would find ourselves at Sonic, where I could keep my cravings at bay. But since I don’t have roommates anymore, I don’t have an excuse to get fast food, so when I get a craving, it becomes the worst craving I have ever had in my life. So to satisfy my urges, I paced across the street to Target, grabbed the biggest bag of tater tots I could find, and then tromped back across the street to enjoy my bounty. Things were going well enough: I had my tots in the oven, Fargo on DVD, and I hadn’t seen a cockroach in days. But because I can’t have good things going for me for more than two minutes, tragedy struck.

Apparently, when the oven is on, the area surrounding the oven becomes hot as well. Not expecting this, I still had my advent calendar propped up against the wall, where it heated up and then preceded to melt. I didn’t realize what was happening at first, but I could smell something really sweet in the kitchen. My first thought was to blame the neighbors, but then I looked and found chocolate seeping through my cardboard calendar, onto my stove, and streaking down the wall. My first instinct was, “Oh no! I need to eat tomorrow’s chocolate!” So I propped open day eleven and started to lick the remaining droplets of chocolate that were still in the mold.

Few things in life gross me out; I work with sewage and I am a microbiologist, I have been desensitized to most things. But one thing in life that makes me queasy would be the sight of melted chocolate. Obviously, the adrenaline from the initial shock of my whole situation made me forget about my issues with melted chocolate, until, of course, after two licks in. I snapped back into reality and I felt like I should induce vomiting. Finally I gathered my senses and put the calendar in the freezer so that the chocolate could set.

The day after the incident, I went to my freezer to eat my daily chocolate. But lo and behold, when I opened up the cardboard window, I found that all of the chocolate had melted into each other, making a monsterish conglomerate of crappy chocolate. I couldn’t just not eat my daily chocolate, so I decided that the whole frozen, chocolate mess would be my gift for December 11^th , and I ate the whole thing in one sitting.

After eating the remnants of my advent calendar, I realized I had no more daily gifts for the countdown to Christmas, which must mean that Christmas is over and I can finally get regular music back on the radio.  This of course didn’t happen, and so I am back to being a “Scrooge.”