The Way of All Flesh

The world appears to be full of dangerous hobbies and people who love them.  People who live for moments of flying down ski slopes at thousands of miles an hour.  People who race cars at astronomical speeds, knowing that a wrong move could send the car up in flames.  People who leap off of tall bridges with only a tiny bungee cord between them and death.  

I’ve always thought of myself as a … well, as a coward.  I drive like a stereotypical grandmother.  If I’m ever attacked by a shark, it’s going to have to be one that has crawled ashore and hiked to find me.  The biggest  risk I take is eating left-overs that are more than three days old.  Okay, granted, I did jump out of a plane once, but really – statistically speaking, that’s FAR safer than crossing a street.  Nope, I assiduously avoid activities that are likely to cause me physical harm. 

Or so I thought.  Yesterday, I realized that one of my favorite every-day activities is incredibly risky.  It’s caused me numerous emergency room visits, pain, scars, and temporary disfiguration.  What is this scary thing I do?  I cook.

Mind you, I’m actually a pretty good cook.  At least in terms of the food I produce; it’s my methodology that seems to be in question.  I began cooking in my mid-teens and within a year, I had caused a fire in my parents’ kitchen.  Now, it was only the kitchen that burned, and I did put it out, and it wasn’t totally destroyed, but there was an awful lot of smoke damage and scorched walls and such.  Then I got my very own apartment in NYC … with a gas stove.  I’d never cooked with gas before, and this was an older stove so it – yep – had to be lit with a match.  I didn’t get the hang of it at first.  What I did get at first was singed fingers and a complete loss of eyebrows, along with my first kitchen-related ER visit.  It wasn’t the last.

The stove wasn’t the problem in my next kitchen.  There, I attempted to open a can with a serrated edge.  The can opener didn’t fully separate the top from the can so I tried to wriggle the top off, not realizing that that serrated edge was slicing through my thumb with every wriggle.  I discovered the problem when I saw blood splattering on the backsplash.  And, as I looked around, the walls.  And the ceiling.  And the floor.  I grabbed a towel which was hanging over the refrigerator door, leaving long streaks of blood down the door, and ran to my neighbor’s.  They wrapped it up for me, let me lie on their couch for a while until I stopped feeling faint, then I went back to my own place where I realized I’d left my apartment door wide open (this, in NYC) with my purse sitting next to it, all the lights on, and the kitchen looking like a scene from an Alfred Hitchcock movie.  I’m so grateful that my roommate hadn’t come home!

The next apartment – the next kitchen – I was stabbing a potato with a knife prior to baking it (everyone does this, right?) and stabbed right on through my thumb.  By this time, I’d learned to recognize when I would need stitches, but I really didn’t have time for a long ER visit that night; I had my law school contracts final the very next day!  I strolled over to the nearest ER, looked at the long line of patients waiting and turned around.  Back home, I decided to approach this logically, so I got out the phone book and opened it to hospitals.  I made a mental note of all those within an easy walking distance and set out again.  (I did lock the door this time, but I also left all the lights on and I left the phone book open to hospitals … and this time my roommate did come home.   Ouch.)

No need to continue.  I’m sure it’s long been obvious to everyone around me that I should take up a safer hobby – like welding – but only last night did I begin to question myself.  Today I have several fingers covered in band-aids.  No stitches needed, but I have gone through half a box of band-aids between last night and this morning.  What did I do, you might wonder, to elicit such blood-letting?  I baked a cake.  A coconut cake.  This requires inserting a screwdriver into the eye of the coconut to let out the juice, then breaking open the shell with a hammer, prying the meat out with the screwdriver and, finally, grating off the brown inner skin.  The upside is that I managed to keep the blood out of the cake. 

I’m considering retiring my apron and taking up a safer hobby.  Maybe mountain climbing.

Car-mically Speaking

Some time ago, I accepted that I have very bad karma in three areas: cars, computers and travel.  (The latter concerns going to and from places and should be distinguished from my fabulous vacation karma – once I get there, I’m golden.)  My computer karma is so bad that one of my colleagues, something of a computer expert, refuses to let me in his office for fear of what my being in breathing range of his computer would do to it.  Lately, however, it’s been my car karma that’s been trying to get me.

My car has needed a lot, recently, ranging from the expected (new tires, new batteries), to the less expected (new catalytic converter, new brakes, new sensors), and as I currently have a leak in my radiator which must be seen to in the very near future, the fun isn’t over.  So when I discovered that one of  those fairly new tires was flat this past weekend, it was a bit more annoying than it might usually have been.  Add to that that the guy from roadside service sent to change it couldn’t find some particular tool he needed (apparently it should live in my car but didn’t appear to be in residence at the moment), so he couldn’t help me, meaning that I then had to have it towed to a tire store … well, you get the picture.  I was fantasizing about living a car-free life again, the way I had in NYC.  Mind you, I live in DC, not NYC, where friends are scattered well beyond the range of the metro system, and where the grocery store, liquor store, and the theatre where I act are all too far away to walk.  Snapped back to reality, I was headed home with my new tire when I noticed a small metal piece in the center console.  Now I know little about cars, but I had no doubt that this was the piece the roadside service guy had needed.   What could I do but burst into laughter?

Later, I told my father about the tire and he asked, “Well, what would a new one cost?”  “A tire?”  “No,” he said, “a car”.  I stated that I don’t think a flat tire is a reason to replace a car.  He noted that the car is 12 years old and has needed a lot of work in recent months, which is certainly true, but, as I pointed out, it has relatively low mileage.  And then I realized why this conversation struck me as so silly.  This is the same man who, when I suggested that if he replaced his twenty-plus year-old mattress he might have less back pain and sleep better, he exclaimed, “You don’t throw out something just because it’s old and not perfect!  Are you going to throw me out, next?”  Again, I had to laugh.

Now I’m wondering if perhaps I haven’t found the answer.  No, I don’t expect my karma to magickally improve.  That radiator is still leaking and yesterday, the console cover broke when I opened it to pull the gas lever.  There’s no reason to assume that I won’t again spend 24 hours in an airport hotel while the airline brings another plane over from Ireland, or that the airlines will suddenly take me off the list of people whose luggage must always be lost.  What is happening, though, is that these things don’t annoy me the way they used to.  I’ve spent a lot of time laughing about the car.  I used the 24 hour layover to catch up on sleep and I’ve learned how to fly without checking bags.  Or I take the train.  So the question is, does it count as really bad karma if it’s not upsetting you?  And even if it does, do we gain good karma by dealing calmly with the bad karma?  And finally, what did I ever do to computers to make them hate me?