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.
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