Daily Archives: January 19, 2016

I Don’t Have To Make The Best Omelet

 in Essays by (updated 2439 days ago)

I wrote this piece last year, and it was lost in when the site had to be overhauled. It was brought up in an online conversation, so I thought I’d put it back up again.

Some people snub reality TV; I love it. At its best, a reality show is a perfect example of story construction necessities (I’ve already written about how CHOPPED is full of lessons), and revealing elements of human nature.  One moment in a particular CUTTHROAT  KITCHEN struck me so deeply it is now become shorthand in my daily lexicon.

The element that makes CUTTHROAT KITCHEN compelling—beyond host Alton Brown’s fantastic suits and ties—is that the contestants are given easy dishes to cook but ridiculous impediments to deal with while they do so. Tiny cookware is a recurring challenge, as is having to fish knives or an essential ingredient out of a pile of something else. The challenge that stuck with me was one chef who was told to make an omelet, but with his pan upside down.

“This doesn’t bother me,” he said, trying to keep his eggs from sliding off the back of his frying pan. “I’m still going to make the best omelet.”

And there was the heart of his problem, which doomed him to failure. Because like CHOPPED, each round of CUTTHROAT KITCHEN only provides a loser, not a winner. He was so focused on making the best omelet he didn’t realize all he had do was not make the worst. Which is why he presented the judge with a very sophisticated batch of scrambled eggs—that had a piece of plastic inside.

All he had to do was make an omelet. As hard as it would have been to keep an egg on top of the wrong side of a flipped-over pan, he could have done it if he scaled back on his presentation. If he had decided just to make an omelet. But because he was focused on making something mind-blowing, he ended up botching the whole thing. Not to mention the fact he didn’t even make an omelet at all.

I so knew he was going to fail that the moment he said that, I turned to JR and said “That’s not the point of the game. You don’t have to make the best omelet. You just have to not make the worst one.”

So is it with life.

Recently I’ve been focused on making the Best Omelet, the one piece of work that will blow everyone’s minds and change everything. Rather than make perfectly delicious metaphorical omelets, and thereby gain a reputation for making quality omelets on a regular basis, I am instead focused on the idea of One Omelet To Rule Them All. Which is an overwhelming task, and makes it extremely difficult to start.

The result has been a few dishes of scrambled eggs with plastic in them. Which is not to say I haven’t also created some pretty amazing omelets, but those were treated no differently than if I had done a simpler, less bells-and-whistley version of the same thing. More than that, I was never satisfied with the work. Because while each of them were amazing omelets, none of them were the best, because that is a title that is literally unobtainable.

I honestly don’t know why I do this myself. Part of it, I imagine, is related to my depression. Setting an impossible goal is an old trick my depression has pulled many times in the past, so this is old hat indeed.

The Best Omelet is a impossibility. Luckily, I don’t have to make the best omelet. I just have to make not the worst one. I just have to be satisfied with accomplishing what I set out to do, and not be disappointed when it doesn’t set the world on fire.

And I have no idea why that is so hard to remember.

A Haiku of Garbage Food

 in Autobiologic by (updated 2439 days ago)

While I am taking a month off, I am not a monster. I’ve added “A Haiku of Garbage Food” to the feed, where J. R. Blackwell and I joined  Ursula Vernon and Kevin Sonney‘s remarkable podcast Kevin and Ursula Eat Cheap. It’s a good two hours of us eating questionable items and making jokes about “children’s whiskey” and “Man Scouts,” and it ends with us eating meticulously-crafted replica poop.

No, really. That’s what we ended on. J.R. and I brought the poop as a gift:

The bear was nice, but I think the raccoon was my favorite.

Ursula and Kevin have another remarkable podcast, The Hidden Almanac, where the vaguely-Catholic Reverend Mord expounds on the history and culture of a rich fantasy world. If you’re a fan of The Voice of Free Planet X, there’s a plethora of reasons to check out The Hidden Almanac. Not the least of which is the fact that VFPX will be crossing over with HA in February!

It’s my favorite episode of the new season, folks. Perhaps because it was so easy to record; we all just stood in Kevin’s recording studio and said our lines. It felt remarkably professional.

I made an upgrade to my gear for the new season, finally purchasing a Blue Snowball, the microphone that has been the standard for my podcasting pals for awhile now. My setup for the past few years has involved a combination of a Zoom H4n recorder and a Blue Snowflake, both of which are marvelous, portable microphones. But with more people coming to me to record, I wanted something a little sturdier, something that will stay at home and record more than one person at once.

Plus, I could get one in chrome. That was a huge selling point.

I’ve been using it a bit, and it is a very, very fine microphone. If you’re thinking about getting into podcasting, trust me, this is the one mic you need.

J.R. and I recently discovered Marie Kondo’s method for tidying up and getting rid of the things you neither want nor need, but are inexplicably holding onto. We’ve become quite taken with it. We’ve already gone through all our clothes and books, both of which were difficult for their own reasons. I am apparently a sock-hoarder; when I had counted all the socks I had accumulated, I found I could go nearly two months without having to wash socks once. Now, I admit to being a bit of a clothes-horse–I kept more clothes than J.R. did–but that was beyond the pale even for me. Some of those socks had literally never been worn.

It’s gotten me to rethink my definition of ownership. I had three pairs of pants that I hadn’t worn in years. They were just sitting in my drawer, taking up space. If you had seen what I’ve worn every day (and, if you follow me on Instagram, you have), you wouldn’t think I owned those three pairs of pants. And if I never used them, did I actually own them? Or was I just storing them?

Going through the books and comics was even harder. I haven’t tackled my longboxes yet, but I reduced my trades and graphic novels by about half. It was difficult to separate from the collector mentality, to look a my comics not as a collection, but as a library. Not “What was I proud I owned,” but “What do I enjoy reading.” So, a lot of comics J.R. had been proud to collect over the past years were removed, some of them common, some obscure, some of them even autographed. But when I look at the book shelf now, I don’t miss them. I kept all the stuff I enjoy.

I donated the rest to Amalgam Comics & Coffeehouse, which just opened not too long ago. My friend Randy Green–aka R-Son The Voice of Reason of Gangstagrass and other such impressive projects–does their comics ordering, which meant he took me seriously when I said I had comics to give, but didn’t quite believe me when I said I didn’t want any money for them. They’re still accumulating their stock, so they were much happier to have volumes of Preacher and Lupin III to sell than I was just storing them. Amalgam is fantastic store, too. If you’re in the Philly area and you haven’t stopped by, you’re cheating yourself.

Seeing Randy so pleased with the comics took some of the edge off how difficult it was to go through them. I don’t know how I’m going to be able to go through my accumulation of toys.

I’ll think of something.