On Cooking, and Emotion

(a picture of an ice cream cone because I couldn't find pictures of anything I've ever actually made)

My friend Courtney Sturges is right. I can't cook. It is invariably a pathetic spectacle. And before you say "Oh, of course you can cook, EVERYONE can cook," I will counter, "Yes. It's true. I fully believe I have the potential to create amazing, delicious meals. Someday, when I work through the emotional issues of impatience, insecurity, love hate relationship with food, and deep seated fear of all things domestic that currently surface whenever I am faced with a kitchen stove."

My preparation involves drinking a half a bottle of wine for fortitude as I set out my ingredients and put water on to boil. Then, slightly tipsy, I rummage around in the pantry and refrigerator and eat things until I'm no longer hungry. So then I've lost all motivation for whatever meal I was going to prepare, but the water is already boiling and I'm going to have to clean up all the stupid stuff I set out anyway, so I just drink more wine and dump the couscous in halfheartedly (it's always couscous; a forty minute wait for rice is a commitment I can't handle at this point in life) and snack on more things while simultaneously commanding myself not to. I will even inexplicably eat the brittle couscous or pasta that doesn't make it into the pan. It's tragic, thats what it is. A big compulsive behavior emotional mess.

I'm getting bored, annoyed, and angry just WRITING about cooking so I'm going to try to wrap this up. But basically, as you can imagine, the most halfhearted of prodding and straining and stir-frying and seasoning attempts ensue, things arriving on the plate watery or crunchy or half-heated, whatever is necessary to get myself as far away from the traumatizing kitchen area, and back to the safe area of my computer and wine and hulu, as soon as possible. And by the time the food makes it into my mouth I am happily distracted watching 30 Rock, and the taste doesn't even matter so much as the grateful knowledge that dinner is over, and I can have cereal in the morning and a sandwich for lunch and I won't have to think about plates, pans, oven dials, or complementary vegetables for a long, long time.

Speaking of vegetables. Last night I visited the kitchen (no, no, I didn't cook two nights in a row. I was getting a wine opener) to find my pretentious mathematics major of a housemate staring quizzically around the room and in the refrigerator. I had an overwhelming Feeling of Doom. Even though there's supposed to be a communal/shared food policy, I feel like I'm sneaking around every time I take anything from the general vicinity of the kitchen, and basically just inherently guilty every time I leave my room.

I seem to have some deep-seated fear that I am a horrible, evil person, which, after significant introspection, has to do with my fear and long time avoidance of all things that I deem to be banal, mundane, domestic, or, basically, normal. I don't know which ways to wash what and what cleaning solutions to use, or how to be super anal about sorting trash, or why you're not supposed to scrub cast iron pots, or how one is possibly supposed to keep track of all the minutiae involved in everyday life. So I avoid those things as much as possible, and instead make vision books of all the spectacular things I'm going to do involving art and rock and roll and boppity bears and world domination. Whilst drinking cheap wine and eating the horrible food I've made and later binge eating on chocolate. This makes me feel content and safe, like normal people might feel at a big dinner with their friends and family. Whereas a big dinner with friends and family is the most traumatizing scenario I can imagine. It involves being seen, being seen while eating, banal conversation about everyday minutiae, more being seen, being seen while eating pie, and utter lack of control over the situation. Traumatizing.

Where was I? Oh, the part where my pretentious apartment-mate called me evil for refrigerating a tomato. Which totally fits in with everything I was just saying. I guess I need to back up one step; first he looked in the refrigerator and saw a tomato in a tupperware container.

"What kind of a MONSTER refrigerates a tomato?!" My pretentious apartment-mate gasped.

Me, that's who. Are tomatoes not supposed to be refrigerated? When was this life lesson? I was under the impression that all vegetables got put in tupperware and refrigerated after use, because I saw a roommate do that with an onion once. There's a very small section of my mind devoted to "domesticity," and there's only so much of that I want to devote to "vegetable storage." If I have to make special notes for each vegetable, that means the whole domesticity section will have to get larger, and soon I'll be displacing boppity bears.

And since I was already feeling totally bad about myself and useless and horrible after a month in the sublet which meant way too much time inside my own harping head, I almost let his comment make me cry. I didn't say anything, bit my lip, and rummaged for the wine opener. My roommate, meanwhile, was puttering around with the tomato and grumbling to himself, eagle-eyeing it before slicing off bad spots while muttering things that (I kid you not) included,

"I just think that anyone who doesn't know how to handle vegetables must be inherently evil."

My mind had two simultaneous bursts of reaction.

"VICTORY!!!!!" Screamed the one part that is constantly berating me, and would pretty much only be happy if I lay constantly in a sobbing heap on the floor, being stepped over and on and ideally even kicked by others as they passed for being such a horrendous waste of space. But before I could collapse accordingly, I heard another part of my mind, the one that wears a jester hat and runs around with toy dinosaurs and ponies throwing glitter at people. It wasn't saying anything. It was just giggling. Gleefully.

And I, somewhere halfway between sobbing and giggling, walked numbly with the two bottles of wine back upstairs.

I'm finishing this post without resolution because it is really only a small portion of the overall theme of the shadow, and how my confrontation of it, or bringing it to light, has been amplified since arriving in San Francisco. Which I totally realized over the past month, and am going to discuss more in the next post. If I have the strength after my chicken salad wrap and mexican hot chocolate. Prepared for me at People's Cafe in Berkeley. Just the way I like. : )