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Tag Archives: mistakes were made

It Made Sense in My Head

10 Thursday Dec 2020

Posted by beneaththehat in Cooking, Reflections

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mistakes were made, personal feelings

Ever since March and the commencement of the quarantine that never ends, I’ve been getting a lot more invested in cooking. I mean this both literally and figuratively. My covetous little eyes are stalking a potato ricer on the regular these days.

I decided that if I was going to have a lot of time on my hands then I should start trying all the dishes I had mentally put in the category labeled ‘Wouldn’t that be nice someday?’. Things I assumed were way outside my skill wheelhouse suddenly became realistic expectations. I made a dark roux in under five minutes, I’ve baked a three layer cake for the very first time, and I cooked a deep dish pizza that slid right out of the skillet without issue! (don’t ask what happened to the second pizza. we don’t talk about second pizza). And naturally I’ve been making a lot of bread with the exception of sourdough. I’m not emotionally ready to invest in sourdough. However, I did bone a turkey without making any massive error or cutting myself! No, I had to wait until I was dicing shallots for that. A few days ago I’d just been thinking about how much I’d improved with a knife and wasn’t it nice I was nicking myself anymore? Oh, hubris.

After having recently lost some skin off my left middle finger, it made me reflect on mishaps that I’ve had in the kitchen in the past. I’ve mentioned burning my hand twice on the same pan in a ten minute time-span on this blog but I have yet to talk about the towel incident. It’s these little embarrassments that keep things in perspective. I may not be a master chef these days but the me from the towel incident absolutely couldn’t have made brioche. We grow, we improve, we get seen doing a colossally stupid thing and so the shame lives inside us to prevent a recurrence.

Right, I should probably actually talk about the towel incident now. Can’t get out of it.

On the evening of a Christmas Day oh so many years ago –

(I was in college but let’s not quibble over dates)

– oh so many, many years ago, we had guests over for dinner and Mom had gotten drained the drippings off the turkey so she could start making gravy. The bread rolls were sitting on the counter, raising contentedly under a towel. Now that the oven was empty of its avian occupant, there was plenty of room to pop the rolls in and essentially finish the last step of Christmas dinner. We were all talking and enjoying ourselves, guests happily stationed at the kitchen table, Mom at the stove, and me standing between the oven and the counter where the rolls innocently dwelled. Once the oven had been adjusted to the correct temperature, Mom asked me to put the rolls in the oven. And so, I did.

With perfect confidence I pulled down the oven door and scooted the rolls across the grate to sit in the middle of the heat. Then I shut the door, returning to the conversation as I leaned against the counter with nary a care.

A savvy reader may have already spotted the problem. Well, you were ahead of my brain in that instant. Actually, you were more than just ahead, your wits were functioning correctly. See, when I had looked down at the rolls covered by that towel I had only the slightest niggling thought about it being there which went along the lines, “Yeah, that’s supposed to be on top of the bread. Always is.”

This was incorrect.

It took a distressing amount of time for this realization to occur. I will always remember standing there, basically lounging in the perfect confidence that what I had done was correct. Obviously bread rolls bake with a towel on top of them. Obviously.

Then, like the one intrepid scientist in a disaster movie who saw it all coming but no one would listen, the thought manifested. It raced through the empty corridors of my head, feet slapping desperately against the floor as it sucked in ragged breaths. Finally, it propelled itself through the doors of HQ, startling all the other thoughts that had been mainly occupied with relaxation and the warm anticipation of a good dinner.

It pointed at them all, shrieking at the top of its lungs, “YOU DON’T PUT FABRIC IN AN OVEN!”

Suddenly there’s a panicked crowd in my head, all understanding the same thing at once. There was a towel in the oven and that oven was on and that oven was HOT. I immediately fell on the oven door, pulled it down, and whipped out the towel that had thankfully not started smoking. It did, however, have faint brown marks across the top where the oven had, probably with a great deal of confusion, begun its work.

I was then stared at by my mother and our guests as everyone figured out what I had done. There was a mix of disbelief and laughter. Not any among them were in quite as stark disbelief as I was. After all, none of them had lived the moments where they were completely and wholeheartedly convinced that putting a towel in the oven was the right thing to do.

In the long run no damage was done. The rolls were delicious, dinner was served, and even the brown marks faded away with a few washings. But I’ll never forget. It took me damn near three minutes to realize towels weren’t magically fireproof and some poor fool had actually given me a high school diploma.

So yeah, these are the things I think about when I have a little oops in the kitchen these days. It could always be worse.

It could have been a towel.

Mysterious and Strange

28 Thursday Sep 2017

Posted by beneaththehat in Reflections, Travel

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Airport, horses, mistakes were made, paranoia, personal feelings

Today I was thinking about my Omens of Ill Fortune post and I realized that aside from my freshman year, something always went wrong whenever I was about to head back for undergrad at Sarah Lawrence.  More than that, it was a gradually escalating scale of bad.  You already know what was on the high end of the scale if you read the Omens post but in case you forgot, I have two words for you.

Walking pneumonia.

But my sophomore and junior year were similarly plagued.  Granted, the sophomore year incident wasn’t so bad.  The night before I was going to fly back I was cooking dinner and put my hand on a pan to get it out of the oven.  No glove because I’m a special genius who understands how ovens work.

(Still not as bad as when I put a towel in the oven because my brain told me it was totally normal, we always put the towel in the HEATED oven.)

So I scorched myself but I’d pulled my hand off fast enough that the skin only went a little red.  Thoroughly chastened, I put on oven mitts and and got the pan on the stove.

Where I then proceeded, not five minutes later, to stick my bare hand on the pan handle to adjust its position.

And yes, the handle is metal.

No, it hadn’t cooled.

This time the burn was not mild because I’d gone and wrapped my whole damn hand around the handle.  My palm got a taste of hell’s inferno right then.  The worst part had to be me just yelling out loud at myself as my mother looked on in bewilderment as to how I’d possibly made the same mistake twice in under ten minutes.

So I’d gone and done the cleverest thing possible.  I had a blister on my right hand not twenty-four hours before I’d need to be using it consistently to drag my suitcase around the airport and then later, you know, unpack my dorm room.  Awesome.  Wow.

Junior year a horse stepped on my back.

The story there is that Brego was still young and slight.  These days he’s a muscled-up freight train of elegance and poise (while still being a total dork sometimes) but in his early years he wasn’t the most sturdy.  You wouldn’t be either if you kept having dramatic growth spurts just as you started filling out.

It’s our last ride together and my trainer has us on the lunge line so she can control the pace of what we’re doing.  Everything’s fine, very routine, until something frightens Brego out of his skin.  Now I never saw what it was but according to witnesses a golf cart took a turn a little too quick and appeared.  Horses aren’t fans of things appearing out of nowhere.  To this day Brego does not like it when something loud and dramatic sounding happens behind him.

My experience goes a little something like this:

Brego leaps up and to the side, throwing the both of us off balance.  The lunge line is nowhere near enough to keep him steady and even though I had kept my seat, for sure wasn’t going anywhere, we were still tipping.  My weight at the angle we were leaning was too much for Brego to correct himself.  I had about a split second to figure this out and to then make the executive decision to bail.  I couldn’t think of a single good thing that’d be accomplished if Brego and I hit the ground together so I decided to take the fall alone.

This was both good and bad.  Good because a horse didn’t fall on my leg.  Bad because Brego still hadn’t quite gotten his feet under him and I was in his way.

Now, horses don’t want to step on you.  They flat-out do not want it.  No thank you ma’am that sounds terrible.  So when his hoof landed on my back he was quick to get it the hell off.  But even with just a fraction of his weight, that is a goddamned heavy animal.  My saving graces in that situation were how fast he got off me, the give of the footing I’d landed in and the fact it was my lower back so my spine had a little cushion around it.

So after checking to be sure I could still move my legs and getting levered off the ground, we went to the hospital and made sure nothing was broken.  They gave me a Vicodin pill that sent me on a ride to Loopy Town but no permanent damage to my back was found.  I lived on Advil for about a week to keep my back from screaming.  Weirdly, it never bruised the way I thought it would.  At most there was a sort of shadow whereas I expected a technicolor spectacular.

Then once I got back to school I had to move furniture so, you know, great timing.

Junior year was actually triple special on the bad news front.  First, my grandfather passed away shortly before I had to go back.  Then the last ride I had up where the horses live ended in catastrophe.  And then when I finally got home to pack up, Hurricane Irene canceled my flight.  Talk about a series of unfortunate events.

Then finally there was senior year with the pneumonia.  I actually can’t believe I hadn’t thought of how bad luck would smack me up the side the head every time I went back to school after summer break.  That might be a good thing, though.  I might never have gone on to grad school there if I thought there was some malevolent spirit gradually upping its game every time I flew back for a new year.

Come to think of it, I also always got bumped from at least one of my chosen classes so I had to scramble to pick a new one every year.

You know what?  I’m making a note.

Never do anything important in late August.

Ever.

When Good Prompts Go Bad

09 Wednesday Dec 2015

Posted by beneaththehat in Reflections

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Family, mistakes were made, my brain is why

I don’t have much use for writing prompts.  If there were any indication in a class summary that prompts would be a feature then I avoided those courses like the plague.  Of course when you’re a writing student these things are sort of an inevitable side effect, like drowsiness or hives.

Or drowsy hives.

For many people prompts can be great!  For me, they are more like a minefield of potential disaster.  My brain is a boiling cauldron of stories yet to be written.  The last thing the cauldron needs is extra ingredients.  As an example, I once got a prompt to use the phrase “At the corner of A Street and B Street” and then go from there.

I got 100 pages into a screenplay.

My plot bunnies are sharp-fanged and blood-soaked.  They leap from the shadows at the barest provocation.  A writing prompt is basically attaching a steak to a fishing pole and dangling it over their den when I’m already being mauled.  Unnecessary.

So when in my first year of grad school one of my professors started giving us a prompt, I felt a tad uneasy.  Luckily the guidelines were stringent.  We were writing a letter in which we describe the classroom.  Cue a sigh of relief that came too soon.  After we’d gotten a ways into our descriptions the professor added, “Now you’re writing this letter to your sister.”

First thought: Susan survived?

Let me lend you guys some context.

I’m an only child so when I was little I pretended I had a lot of brothers and sisters.  Then it occurred to me that I needed a reasonable explanation to give people about why my supposed siblings were never seen.  So I decided they all must be dead.

I committed to this narrative.  I have a vivid memory of standing alone in my room, staring into my sock drawer thinking, “These were Susan’s socks.  She’s gone now.”  It’s not clear but I think Susan’s demise was supposed to be due to her falling over a cliff.

There was also an incident at Disneyland where I described to the train conductor in detail about how my little brother had been killed by a train.  He told my mother how sorry he was for her loss.  Mom then had to explain how there was no brother and no train.  They don’t really include how to tell strangers that your child invented deaths for her imaginary siblings in parenting books, do they?  Terrible oversight.

This also resulted in me sitting in a writing class decades later, suddenly writing an incredibly sinister letter to my presumed dead sister about how glad I was she wasn’t dead after all.  Maybe the sinister tone wasn’t necessary but, look, the circumstances had just gotten really weird.  In this prompt I was describing the room to just some anonymous person but then, twist!  Actually I’m writing my sister, who I’ve thought dead since childhood but I’ve now somehow tracked down so I could write about my classroom to her?

Also, all my siblings died in “accidents”.

And Susan’s been in hiding?  Yeah, in this scenario there really is no way for me to write to my sister without it being at least a touch sinister.

It didn’t help that my reaction was to basically write, “I’m so pleased you survived!”

But don’t worry.  It gets worse.

The professor then adds another layer to the prompt and tells us our sister has cancer or some presumably lethal disease.

“Well, I guess you almost survived me.”

Christ on a crutch but this got dark fast.  Now this letter isn’t just sinister but actively cruel and mocking.  Like my imaginary siblings hadn’t suffered enough, now one of them had been resurrected just in time to suffer a little more by being reminded of all their dead family and how they’d nearly died in childhood only to be stricken with a deadly disease.  Oh, and the person writing this letter?  Presumably the sibling who’d arranged for all the deaths and was now gloating about how the one that got away isn’t getting away for much longer.

And I took all her socks!

In the end I’m left sitting in class, staring at a letter from some horrifying sociopath and wondering what the hell just happened inside my head.  What a strange confluence of events.

In conclusion, sometimes grad school is weirder than you were expecting.  And sometimes it’s not the writing prompt’s fault that your brain is a bucket sloshing to the brim with strange.

It may also be a really good thing that I’m an only child.

…. as far as you know.

Computer Mysteries

09 Tuesday Jul 2013

Posted by beneaththehat in Technology Issues

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Tags

computer, mistakes were made

Image      What…?

No, wait, what is this doing here?  What is it?  Why is this image on my desktop?  I don’t think I recognize it.

Wait… No.  I do recognize this.  What do I recognize this from?  It’s the back of a card but why would it be here?  I haven’t deliberately put anything like this on my desktop so why…

Oh God.  I do know what this card is.  It’s the back of the online solitaire card.

WHY.  WHAT.

Okay, so apparently I’ve dragged this unintentionally from my solitaire game online to my desktop only for it to wait quietly in a corner for me to notice it.  That is the only explanation I can give.

Mostly I can give that explanation because after noticing one card image and deleting it I proceeded to drag the card image several more times onto my desktop inadvertently.  Mystery solved!

I miss the time when this was just a technical mystery instead of being a tale of how ridiculously unobservant I was on my computer.

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