Starting From Scratch

I’ve love chocolate chip cookies. As far back as I can remember, my dad always had us help him make cookies on the weekends. My mom has a picture of me, Siri and Dad making a batch—Siri and I are each standing on chairs to reach the counter top, and I’m wearing yellow “footie” pajamas. I still remember how important it would make me feel when my dad would drape the kitchen towel over my shoulder. It served as a symbol of rank, like those dangly yellow tassles naval admirals have on their shoulders. In our family, the one with the kitchen towel on his shoulder was in charge.

“Boy, do I go for those! Why they’re great on… or even plain.”

We always made our cookies from scratch. I don’t know whether in those days EVERYTHING was made from scratch, or if we were just too poor to do it any other way. To us there was no other way. The cupboard next to our stove (no matter which house we lived in) was always stocked with sugar, flour, and chocolate chips.

“Come and get it! The victuals’ on, the table’s set, it’s all a-waitin’ to be et!" (ibid)

Half way through college my roommates and I discovered the cook and serve, pre-made Otis Spunkmeyer chocolate cookie dough in the frozen foods section at Costco. No more powdering my nose with flour, no more picking egg shells out of the mixer, just place the dough on the cookie sheet and, oujalah, you’ve got piping hot chocolate cookies ready for the eating.

Once I moved in by myself, I decided to go back to the old fashioned way of making the cookies from scratch. I’m not as pressed for time as I was back when I had homework and intramural games tugging at my schedule. But I’m finding that its hard to remember everything from that recipe that I could have thrown together in my sleep at age 11. Making anything from scratch is hard work.

“It's gone.”
“What?”
“I said it's gone. The whole investment. The whole shebang.”
“Oh, gosh!”
“Not the beach, Dad!”
“Under water. All of it.”
“His face told the tale. One phone call and the Pfeiffer fortunes had landed on the continental shelf. So of course, being neighbors, there was only one thing we could do:”
“Waiter? Double steak sandwich - make it fast, huh?”

I lost all my blog files today. I don’t know what happened. I was writing one of the greatest blogs of all time about the Valentine’s Day weekend. I started on it before the weekend began and I spent all my free time on it this morning. I had it all but finished—all it needed was a final paragraph and to verify one Back to the Future quote. I keep the files on a jump drive (its easier that way to work on it at both home and work). When I got home the files weren’t there. So I figured it must have saved to my work computer instead of the jump drive. But when I got back to work, it wasn’t there either.

“Now, look at this next entry, it’s the kicker. ‘White rabbit object.’ Whatever it did, it did it all, but with the keychecks off, the computer didn’t file the keystrokes, so the only way to find them now is to go through the computer’s lines of code one by one.”
“How many lines of code are there?”
“About 2 million.”

I tried every way I could think of to recover that file. It wasn’t just the Valentine’s blog that I lost. It was the file where I put all of my ideas on ice until I have a chance to write about them in blog form. Topics like exploring the limits of sanitation hazards when I have to work at the desk of a co-worker when she’s on vacation, a study of my awesomeness within the context of using Ebay to find things that I had assumed were non-existant, and exploring the vast similarities between Heath Bryant and Kevin Arnold.

Today’s mishap was more than just a guy losing a computer file. Today the world lost an historic document full information vital to the future of mankind, we have lost a volume of wisdom to which our children and theirs ought to have had an inheritance. The gap this loss will leave in the historical records of this planet will be remembered as a tragedy comparable to when Martin Harris lost the first 116 translated pages of the Book of Mormon or when the majority of the 1890 U.S. census was incinerated in the 1921 U.S. Commerce Department fire.

Dealing with the pressure

They say that beans are the magical fruit, but the older I get, the more apparent it is that every food has the ability to cast that same spell upon me.

“What an incredible smell you’ve discovered.”

Perhaps one of the rites of passage into manhood is for your bowels to undergo an internal armageddon. I’d always expected that change to have something to do with fatherhood because most of my experience with adult flatuation has been second hand, while in the presence of my dad or my friends’. But as I cross the threshold of my mid 20s, I’m beginning to believe that age is to blame, not procreation.

I won’t admit that father hood doesn’t play a key role in it—I think it does: once you’re married and start having kids, you stop worrying about social proprieties and you just “let yourself go” in certain areas.

But I am not a father, and I DO have some social dignity left, so as I may be hopeless to stop the changes I’m experiencing in adulthood, I don’t have to remain defenseless against them. I will not surrender to the pressures within.

“Why for 53 years, I’ve put up with this now. I must find some way to keep [all this] from [churning], but how?”

Well, where would the human race be if we didn’t adapt to our situations? If we didn’t notice that our armpits stunk and started using deodorant, the perpetuation of the race might have ceased. In the same heroic pioneering spirit that our deodorizing forefathers possessed, I’ve decided to try an experiement…

“You okay, Robin?”
“I sure am, Batman—thanks to that anti-penguin-gas pill!”

Products like Gas-X and Beano have been on the market for years, and for just as long they have provided great comedic material for adolescent boys in their efforts to tease sisters and friends who accidentally cut the cheese. But until now I never realized that they could possibly serve an alternate purpose. Instead of just teasing others about their need for such “anti-gas” pills, what if I actually used them for myself?

“Uh golly, Lois, what are you doing?”
“When was the last time you heard me [rip one], huh? Well, you’re never gonna hear me [rip one] again.”
“No?”
“Nope, I read this book and it says that if you get a thousand milligrams of Vitamin C every day, you stay in perfect health.”
“Golly, a thousand? That’s certainly a lot of oranges though, isn’t it Lois? There are pills you know? I’ve seen them.”

I think the pills were developed to alleviate bloating and other legitimate gastro-intestinal problems, not just your common, garden variety case of gas. But would it be possible to take these tablets regularly and by so doing omit every form of methane emissions from my daily life?

“How can we stand on the brink of discovery and not act?”

Think of it, gas isn’t such a bad thing that you HAVE to live without it, but if modern technology provides the opportunity, why would you not? Well, I asked that very question of my trusty compadres Dustin and Ty.

“Pills?! That’s the modern way to do things. THIS is natural. Besides, I get my exercise that way.”

They seemed quite opposed to it. “Dude, why would you want to do that? I love to fart.” “Yeah, dude. Not farting isn’t natural.”

My response, “Yeah? Well, putting deodorant on your armpits isn’t natural either, but I sure wish more people would do it.”

I’ll be the first to admit that my own flatulence (and other people’s reflex response to it) has provided me with years of side-splitting laughter, but is the entertainment value of it truly enjoyable enough to outweigh the convenience of possibly never having it hit me at an inopportune time again? I’m sure it’s the kind of question each man who has ever contemplated getting a hysterectomy has seriously considered. The beauty of taking a pill to quell the gas is that it’s not permanent. If I know I’m going to go camping with the guys or anything else where one is encouraged to perform, I just skip the pill that day and, poof, I’m right back on my game.

“The world is changing so fast, and we're all running to catch up.”

The irony of life is that the older you get, the more gas you’ve got and the less often you can find a convenient moment to let it loose. The remedy to this irony can be found in a little green pill. Technology is an amazingly wonderful thing, those who embrace it will flourish, while those who ignore it will be outcast from society like the lepers of old. Consider yourself warned, “if you don’t adapt, you die.”