floorpie

I’m addicted to cooking competition shows; which, in and of itself, I find amusing. Cooking competition? Like for points and whatnot? An act of love, or just basic survival, morphed into something grade-able seems incongruous to me.

Anyway, Top Chef, Top Chef Masters, Iron Chef, Throwdown with Bobby Flay, The F Word, Hell’s Kitchen and to a lesser extent Kitchen Nightmares…I watch them all.

ALL.

I used to be into just your normal cooking shows…whether this be because that’s really what my tastes were at the time, or because the competition variety wasn’t around, yet, I don’t know. Yan Can Cook and The Naked Chef still rank high for me.

At any rate, the cooking shows serve (as with everyone) as motivation for cooking more. So, in the last few months I’ve discovered how easy (overblown) crepes are, how really easy hummus is, and how I still don’t have anyone to cook a roast for. I’ve made salmon, mussels and clams, and whole fish. I’ve made nasi goreng, tortilla chips, and japanese curry. And on and on. Some of it was new to me, a lot of it was revisited, and all of it was fairly pretty good.

Technically, I think I’m a pretty good cook. Recipes are easy and techniques don’t seem all that daunting… all I really need is motivation.

Annnnd, now I’m hungry.

I just spent the better part of a Saturday cleaning half of my apartment. I’m not sure why that is so exhausting; but seeing as my place is already pretty clean to begin with, I’m either spectacularly out of shape or incredibly anal. (hello, google-searches for “incredible anal”)

I’m not sure where I’m going with this other than that I would have rather been at the beach…but then when would I get the cleaning done…but then when can I go to the beach?

Also learned today: do not post without anything to say.

Why do I still get searches for Bobby Trendy on my site? I mean, obviously he is fabulous, but wasn’t his 15 minutes up about 5 years ago?

The first time I went to prom I felt like I was too cool for school and didn’t take my date and friends back home for pictures with the parents. After all, we were taking pictures at everyone else’s houses and I could just get copies. To this day, this is one of the top 5 instances of my life that still fill me with guilt and regret. The other four have to do with that chilling series of mysterious deaths in the Andalusian Fores…you know what, never mind. Of course it wasn’t about the pictures themselves, it was about the act of taking them and the sharing of the moment. If only my mom and dad still lived in SoCal, I might have made up for it last night.

Last night being my second prom.

Second prom being a prom-themed party on the roof of the Andaz in Hollywood. ‘Cause that’s how adult proms roll. This time around I wasn’t the trombone-playing eagle scout with glasses and braces who barely scored a date at the last minute. This time I was the super cool product designer and eagle-scout (it never leaves you, you see) guy who got asked by a (gorgeous) girl…also at the last minute.

Thank you LA thrift store Aardvark’s Odd Ark you gave me not only the best frilly shirt ever with absolutely no warning or foresight, but a now daily outfit until the day I die…resplendent and beautiful my still-warm corpse bathed in the glow of my pert frills.

Date was a vision, spot was cool, alcohol was partially free, food was entirely free, and I didn’t have to go to a weird Italian restaurant that I didn’t even really like.

Did I mention it was awesome? I didn’t. It was.

I just wish there had been more awkward dancing and tears over common dresses.

Sorry, I drifted off there for a sec.

Everyone gets depressed. Well, not ME, I’m perfect; but everybody else does from time to time. An it’s funny the kind of clarity that you can see easily from the outside looking in, that is so desperately out of reach from within.

Humans are social creatures (or so I am told), and the majority of complaints seem to center on how alone people feel. Alone. Except for your roommates, and the co-workers you see every day, and the friends you haven’t seen in a few months because you’ve been busy, and the hundreds to thousands of people you see every. single. day.

That doesn’t seem like alone to me. “Lonely” maybe, but not alone.

The ironic thing, as I sit in my empty apartment writing this and start to create a feeling of solitude within me base purely on the subject matter, I know that if there was someone here right now, I’d be jonesing for them to leave so I could be alone.

Unless she was hot.

The weird thing about keeping a blog that relatively no one reads is that I go to an awful lot of trouble to have the privilege of doing so. OK, it’s not that big of a deal, but I do have to keep registering the URL and paying for server space. It’s kind of like burning a dollar bill every time you write in your paper journal.

“I am the KING of similes!” he said with some sarcasm.

Given the audience, I might as well use this space to write my grocery or To Do lists so I could access them anywhere the internets are sold. Or just post all of my bank account numbers and passwords so I wouldn’t have to try and remember them. Wait, something seems wrong with that last one.

Perhaps I should try and be more internet-popular again. Here’s my first attempt: JESSICA ALBA SEX SCENE!

I’m rapidly approaching 35. And I don’t mean like how the waif blonds get so depressed on their 25th birthdays because they’re ALMOST 30…I mean I’m actually rapidly approaching 35. Like in the next couple of months.

You know the people that say “age is just a number”? Yeah, those are the people for whom age is just a number. I used to be one of those people; and was, in fact, for roughly 34 years, 187 days.

Not that I’m obsessing about it or anything.

Actually, I’m not obsessing about it, yet…but it does keep popping into my head randomly, which is odd. Recently it’s been a lot of, “wow, 35 years…that’s old.” Then today, it was, “wow, 35 years…what do you have to show for it?” That’s a harder pill to swallow. On paper, maybe not so much: still unmarried and a string of semi-successful but ultimately failed relationships, still renting yet doing so by choice so as to be able to leave near the beach, doing ok career-wise but may be stuck in middle-management for a long long time, lots of friends though maybe not enough to fill a club, in a silly office-band, still have the majority of my hair and maybe at least a 2-pack, feet hurt all the time though, and the bones are a bit creaky. It ain’t all bad.

I wonder if I’ll make another 35? I’d like to think so.

It’s funny the things you remember. There are expected things like particularly good or bad situations in your life. There are repetitive things like birthdays and remembering to breath. And then there are just kind of throwaway memories that stubbornly persist.

I had this girlfriend once who, while taking a shower together (SCANDAL!), wanted the water a little hotter. Being closest to the taps (it was the individual hot and cold kind, not the combined one) I reached down to turn the knobs. Thinking “more hot”, I opened the hot tap a little more. She looked at me with kind of a disgusted look and said something along the lines of, “I guess I’m more concerned about the environment than you are.”

What??

“Because opening up the hot tap uses more energy than just closing up the cold one”

Oh.

Needless to say, we broke up eventually. I certainly can’t argue with the logic, but the manner in which it was delivered honestly hurt my feelings. Perhaps that’s why the incident has stuck with me. Every. single. time I adjust the water temperature in the shower I think of it.

Lord in Heaven above, thank you for the gifts that you bestow on your humble servant on earth. Though undeserving, your magnanimous grace provideth me gifts of bounty and happiness.

Thank you, baby jesus, for sending to this sinner: Voltron on Hulu. Amen.

As a product designer, I go to a lot of design reviews. Passionate and long conversations about the smallest minutiae. And when I say smallest minutiae, I mean the size of a small 1mm radius on the back of a product that lives in an environment that you never interact with. How does it make you feel? What is the message it conveys? Does it communicate friendliness combined with functionality.

It’s incredibly detailed in an emotional way.

And I dig it.