Also: some things I hate.

My morning went something like this:

1) What? You are magically out of nothing but my favorite flavor of bagel AND my favorite flavored cream cheese AND my favorite highly carbonated fructose beverage?

2) Appointment #1: You currently have no visa status; I know this because I, myself, with these kielbasa-sized fingers, ended it last Friday afternoon while listening to Loreena McKennitt on my iTunes because you saw fit to not be enrolled as a student, like, at ALL this semester.

3) Appointment #2: You were hit by a car? Je-SUS.

4) Appointment #3: I see. So, you want me to sit here and watch you fill out the forms we told you to have prepared before your arrival, asking me to cut the little pictures you had taken of yourself for the application AND talk to you about a completely unrelated process for work authorization while simultaneously helping you fill in your incomplete forms? And your breath smells like you've been snacking out of a cat-box and drinking water from drainage ditches? Fantastic.

As the rank shroud of uncharitability envelops me in an icy embrace, I find my interior workings feasting on the putrid carcasses that are the Things I Hate.

First Thing I Hate: "Easy" recipes.

I am going to level with you good people. There are only, say, twenty things that I can cook and have them not resemble, in taste, smell and consistency, untreated human waste.

Before leaving the Republic for Michigan, Alert Life in the Corn devotee Brooke gave me several of her gently-used, redundant cooking implements - as a newlywed, she'd acquired about seventy metric tons of household goods- and among them was a lovely crockpot.

I have watched my sainted mother and countless other people successfully prepare nutritious yet savory meals in one of these devices. As I understood it, you put raw food in, stir, and turn the heat on and wait. This is, apparently, an oversimplification of a possibly complex process and I, in my infinite wisdom, met my culinary doom just the other night at the hands of the Crockpot that Renders Food into Inedible, Viscous Sludge.

It seemed logical enough: take some rice, some meat, plenty of water and sauce and let it warm to perfection overnight. I have seen my mother cook meals over the course of eight hours while she was at work; why wouldn't it work if I was asleep while it was cooking? I awoke at 2 AM to a delicious smell, and I went in to the kitchen to stir my loveliness. At this point, at 2 AM Indiana Time, the food had as of yet to undergo its hideous metamorphosis. When I awoke at 6:20 and hastened to the crockpot, I beheld a putrid, inedible, burned-all-over slurry holding court in my crockpot; I wouldn't have fed that shit to disease-ravaged alley-dogs. The worst part(s)? It still smelled delicious, and it was supposed to have been my contribution to an office potluck that would begin, oh, about five and a half hours from that point.

To answer your questions - and there must be legion - yes, there was enough liquid. Yes, the heat was on low. And yes, the crockpot works properly otherwise. Why, then, did I find myself forcing two pounds of nearly unidentifiable sludge down my disposal at 10 PM last night after I'd chipped most of it out of my crock? Am I a bad cook? Am I too functionally "special" to use a device that has been described as being "so easy to use that one can throw food in and forget it"? Or is it, as I suspect is the case, that having the unholy presence of Markie Post in Greenwood affects the functionality of baser machinery in addition to being the reason that local dogs are forming into feral packs?

Second Thing I Hate: He Whose Name Is Accurs-ed.

I was walking down Kirkwood Avenue two days ago, basking in the 45-degree heat, when I noticed that someone walking ahead of me (about a dozen yards) had a familiar swagger. Since I had been occupied thinking of, oh I dunno, cheese, it took a moment to register who I was seeing.

Yes, it was him. The former roommate and former friend who'd left me $700 in debt and bereft of even a pot in which I would have cooked my food, had he not taken it all. I reflexively opened my mouth and hissed but, realizing I was in public, I ducked into a nearby storefront to hide from him. I don't know precisely why I thought hiding was necessary; I've always wanted a chance to tell him exactly what I think of him, and there was certainly nothing I should have been ashamed about. I wrote him a letter just after he left and never sent it to him a) because he is illiterate and I tend to use "big words" and b) because I didn't want to encounter difficulty with the law. It went something like this:

Dear Diarrhea-Filled Douchebag Diaper-Dumpster,

I hope this letter finds you in the grips of a paralyzing Giardia infestation which renders you utterly unable to frolic beyond the confines of your undoubtedly tastelessly decorated bathroom. Hell, I hope you can't even get off the can, and that consequently hen's egg-sized piles erupt forth from your nether-regions making the mere act of sitting down rather like squatting on a wet grapefruit.

If you were able to feel any humanoid emotions, I would tell you that I am fine, and happier than I have ever been in the entirety of my life. I have a great job, friends who care about me while they are sober, a helvacı kabağı, and I am utterly free of venereal disease. Since you are not, though, I wanted you to know that I - possessed of a soul - believe you to be the shallowest, most reprehensible person I have ever met. I want to meet every woman you date and tell her your "stories", which often end with lubeless sodomy or ruined sheets. I want to meet everyone who admires you and tell them about how you treat your own mother, who loves you more than anything in her life. And I want to meet you just one more time and fling a freshly-extruded duke at your open mouth.

I loathe you with an intensity that, when I think about it hard enough, causes dugongs in the Indian Ocean to bleed from their mammaries. So, think about those poor endangered sea-cows and do them a favor by dropping dead.

All the best,

Dom

Third Thing I Hate: The sorostitute in my anthro class.

Many of you who read my special epistle to that fancy hippie girl will be happy to know that, after the second week of classes, she no longer graces us with her presence. Rumor has it that she's gone to Jamaica to work barefoot in a ganja plantation; with any luck she'll feck up and be beaten with the broad side of a machete until inch-high weals appear on her unwashed buttocks. Anyway, more insidious still is a girl whom I'd previously not noticed in my blind loathing of the wretched hippie pot-priestess: a genuine, true to life sperm-receptacle sorostitute. Her teased, platinum-blonde-highlighted chestnut hair cascades over poofy, shiny coats that have been filled with the soft down from the underbellies of infant harp seals; her skin-tight Lycra pants terminate inside pale pink Ugg boots. In a ten minute presentation last week, she used the word "like" 32 times by my count. The most horrifying part is this:

She's my project partner.

I mean, honestly. In a way, I would have preferred that I'd had hippie girl as my partner for the final project; at least she could be motivated by something other than the thought of keggers and sweaty gropings in the Deke basement on the coats. She's the kind of young woman who is usually described by her actions rather than her name; the phrase "parking my beef bus in tuna town" springs to mind. The worst part is that I know that I will end up doing our entire project myself to spare the horror of her trying to incorporate the only book she's ever read - Charlotte's Web - into a discussion of postmodern tourism and global consumerism. Goddamn she bites it.

Fourth Thing I Hate: Pretentious names for housing complexes.

While I fully agree that, sometimes, truth in advertising is not prudent - after all, who would want to live in the "Treeless, Soulless Cookie-Cutter Subdivision of Stultifyingly White Suburbian Blight"? - giving names to these units like "Fox Glen Manor" and "Pheasant Ridge" and "Buffalo Creek" is irresponsible. This is because I, if I were to live in a place named Pheasant Ridge, would expect to see largish fowl erupting from the weeds on the outskirts of the parking lot or I would feel utterly cheated - let alone if I lived in Pronghorn Promenade or something. Don't exotify (is that a word?) the inane; call a spade a spade.

***

Yesterday, at the (for me) star-crossed potluck, the theme was Mardi Gras. During the merriment, a cake was unveiled to partially satiate the undying hunger our office has for sweets. Into this cake had been baked

four tiny plastic babies

which, apparently, bring luck to s/he who consumes a piece that contains one.

Clearly, even if it took five or six pieces, I simply had to be able to say that a baby had been in my mouth. As we were gently prodding our cake, Alert Life in the Corn Devotee Jenny turns to Molly (not knowing that Molly is aware of the plastic infants) and says

Be careful when you eat the cake.

To which Molly replies:

Oh, because of the babies?

Maybe you had to be there, but cautioning someone from eating cake too quickly because it might contain babies? Why, I about died.

And, after consuming three pieces of cake, I have a plastic baby of my own. His name is Melchior. Oh yes, divine.

Until this weekend, I remain,

Domonic