New Thing #2: But Donna Reed was so hot.

Despite voluminous evidence that I have no place in a kitchen, I periodically go Donna Reed crazy and try to cook food.

This usually means Indian cuisine. Admittedly, not very Donna Reed. But somehow a 26-item ingredient list manages to scream “Delicious!” while muffling “You’ll be washing dishes for the next 30 hours.” Kind of like a 1950s sitcom.

So on Friday, my free day, I attempted a banquet of samosas with cilantro chutney, paneer with peas and a Kashmiri pistachio chicken stew. I wrote out a schedule to have it all done by the time Said Guy walked through the door. My 2010 version of Donna Reed.

It took about two hours to figure out how to puree cilantro. Another two hours dry-roasting and grinding spices. Another three hours peeling, chopping, dicing and mincing stuff. Another hour shelling pistachios with my now-finely-minced thumb.

At that point, I decided to just get the chicken done in time for dinner. It was surprising to me that a recipe for four people called for 3.5 lbs of chicken. But there it was: “3.5 lb. chicken or chicken pieces.”

I dirtied every pan in our cupboard trying to find one big enough to cook that much chicken. It was still a pink pile of blobbies when Said Guy got home from work to find the kitchen completely trashed, his little lady drenched in tears and salmonella, and nothing for supper.

He told me the 3.5-pound measurement includes bones, so I had basically doubled the recipe. He added ingredients to bring everything to proportion while I washed dishes.

About two hours later, he had rescued the chicken. A little bland, he conceded, but edible.

That’s when I decided to add some cumin.

I didn’t know the sprinkle cap was removable when I opened the canister and gave it a shake.

About 15 tablespoons of cumin dumped onto the salvaged Kashmir chicken.

Said Guy didn’t have much to say for the rest of the night.

But I awoke Saturday with the will to redeem myself. I finished the samosa filling the day before and just had to make the pastry dough for the wrappers. It looked simple enough: flour, salt, oil, water. Roll flat, cut into circles.

And here’s how Friday’s folly turned into Saturday’s success: I used my rolling pin for the first time.

The samosas are fine and ready to be cooked. The kitchen remains in one piece. Said Guy got home in time to actually see me use a rolling pin.

So I’ll never be Donna Reed.  I can still learn to roll out some pastry dough at an angle strategic to viewer enjoyment.

That has to be worth something.

The New Things

It’s been a rough couple of weeks since I hurt my back.

There were two days off work, during which I saw no one but my boyfriend — and only for a short time, as he’s been super busy with work. Cutting the mountains out of my life has caused a raging case of cabin fever. I had plans for a fun trip with friends, but that got canceled.

I cannot hang out by myself or be inside for too long. A few days after the back injury, I saw a TV show in which someone was asked, “If you were an animal, what would you be. Don’t think, just answer.” I blurted out, “Cocker spaniel!” because I always felt that was the animal I most looked like.

Then I did some research.

“Cocker Spaniels are well known for their loving personality and bouncing energy. … Loneliness and boredom are the two major causes of misbehavior in cocker spaniels.”

Wow.

In the past two weeks, Said Guy and I had our biggest fight ever. I took all the chocolate out of the office candy bowl one night. I told my friend I was out of gum even though I had an extra piece, just so I wouldn’t have to share. I’ve had pretty detailed daydreams about how I’d kill certain people and then rehearsed my big, “Go ahead, send me to prison!” courtroom speech in front of the bathroom mirror.

And to the girl in front of me at the grocery store, who, while chatting vapidly with her idiot friends, swept her credit card and then accidentally canceled the transaction — TWICE:

I do suspect you are learning-impaired, but I’m sorry I said it out loud.

No, the cocker spaniel has not been well-behaved.

The solution seems simple: have more fun.

But boredom comes with two paradoxes.

1. The more bored I get, the less effort I feel like putting into my own entertainment.

2. The more bored I get, the less appreciative I am of the exciting things that do happen.

So here’s the plan.

I decided to do one thing every day.

It’s not the most original idea in the world, but the method seems sound. If you can’t actively try something new, you have to figure out what everyday occurrance amounts to a new experience.

Have any of you tried doing this? Would any of you like to try with me?

For now I’m going to track my progress here at Poor Penmanship. I’ll post each New Thing the following day, starting today with yesterday’s New Thing. If it fills up too much of this blog, I’ll start a separate one. If others want to do this, maybe we can make a community blog or something.

And DEFINITELY let me know if you have suggestions for New Things I might do.

Bitches and idiots

I take Interstate 80 to work. I love it. It’s maybe the greatest American road.

But this morning a real ho-bag intruded on my piece of paradise.

It wasn’t an outrageous thing. She just tailgated. A lot. Driving 70 in the middle lane, I could see only the tops of her headlights behind me. When she finally passed me, she came within a yard of my taillight. And promptly started riding someone else’s ass.

She veered violently from lane to lane, as if her whole goal was to crowd as many different people as possible. Like, to make a car-language statement: “YOU NEED TO UNDERSTAND THAT I AM MORE IMPORTANT THAN YOU.”

I got madder and madder, to where I picked up my phone and started calling the police.

She’s violating us! I thought. This is not what I-80 is about!

Sure, people drive crappy everywhere. But the mortal and venial sins of I-80  mostly relate to the fact that it is 2,900 miles and almost never turns. People forget to drive well. They fall asleep, text at the wheel, hit 100 mph without even noticing, stare at everything but the road, daydream, get oblivious.

They call police while driving to complain about the spirit of the open road.

I put my phone back down.

Where the eff is Kosovo?

I stumbled upon this geography game, and it’s taking me back to my traveling days. Back when I had a dream: to go from China to the Atlantic overland via some stanstanistans, into Turkey, through eastern Europe and west on out.

The second-biggest problem

The Caspian Sea and its attendant dead ends of Who Will Sponsor Me In Iran and My Mom Doesn’t Want To See Pictures Of Ethnic Warfare.

The biggest problem

It kinda turned out I didn’t know where any countries were.

What the hell comes after Turkey and Greece? A bunch of those scaryish places that were on the news a lot when I was a kid. Whatever did happen to the former Yugoslavia? I thought the Macedonians were some ancient civilization. Were they back? Was Slovenia one of the Yugo-mess countries or one of those cold places with a screwed-up economy? How DO you pronounce Milosevic? Where the eff is Kosovo?

Everything they say about Americans is true.

It was embarrassing to keep mixing up “Baltic” and “Balkan.” So I spent some time poking at my atlas and reading articles. I saw pictures online, and both regions looked awesome. The food, the churches, the landmines picturesque hillside villages.

The new dream

I was willing to skip the whole Caspian problem and just fly to Turkey from China. That way I could backtrack to the safer parts of the Caucasus (even more awesome) and head on through eastern Europe.

That was 2003. Then the Iraq war started, SARS came to China and the dream was deferred.

I have no idea when I’ll actually make it to these cool places, where plate tectonics and human diversity have been crashing it out for so long.

But now that I’m acing these geo-quizzes, the dream is back in my head.

Where do you most want to travel?

Related posts:

• Another point of view
• Traces of civilization
• 48 hours
• Why don’t we paint the town
• Chinese New Year letter

Devastated

Every once in awhile, you find something that gives you a sense of wholeness.

Before that one thing, you don’t even know how drab your existence is. You go from day to day thinking, “This is as good as it gets.” And it’s fine.

But in retrospect, you were enacting a tragedy of opportunity wasted.

Then, by some force of coincidence or fate, you feel an unusual sense of daring at the very same moment that you stumble upon a risk that is just attractive enough to take.

A friend once told me, “You don’t fall in love. You throw yourself into it.” And that’s really how miracles happen. You throw yourself into the possibility that the best of life can’t be realized in your comfort zone. You abandon the safe road. Per aspera ad astra.

Suddenly, you understand what you’ve been missing.

You wake up every morning next to this prize, the reward for your courage. You open your eyes, and there it is next to you. It gives you such optimism. Such confidence. You look in the mirror and feel smarter and prettier than you ever felt before. You tell jokes to strangers at parties.

And you have this foolish trust that it will never break.

With that trust, the celebration diminishes. You just get used to believing it will always be there. You don’t even notice that it’s getting weaker and weaker. You get a little careless. You don’t treasure it like you should.

You can hardly believe your eyes when it snaps.

You can’t even see the pieces.

The first morning is the worst. You wake up like you have for so long, expecting to reach over and hold what was so beloved.

All that’s there is disappointment. The absence of good.

You try to remember how you were content before. Before your leapt in the hope that you could have something that always seemed to be for … I don’t know, other people.

Now that it’s wrecked, you realize that you always knew those happy days would end. Some of us aren’t built for “forever.” It doesn’t matter how hard you try.

You feel like an insignificant bug, born to be squashed.

Until you can afford to replace your first pair of hipster glasses, you kind of look like one, too.

Bug face.

Related posts:

• Goddamn vanity
• Back-to-school shopping makes me want to gouge out my own eyes
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