Rice For Dinner

Sometimes you just have one of those days, you know? You go downstairs to make dinner, and you're excited because it's going to be some kind of cool sweet-and-sour thing over rice that you came up with compiled from various recipes. It's really easy, too--just put some random stuff (dates, sugar, water, cumin, tamarind extract, stuff like that) in the food processor and process it until it's done. But, for whatever reason, it doesn't work. It's disgusting. You try to fix it, to balance the ingredients, but it doesn't want to be fixed. It remains inedible. You could try harder-you know you could probably fix this somehow-but your heart's just not in it today. You're all stressed, for whatever reason--your former housemate is exhibiting creepy and potentially dangerous behavior, you're worried about your teaching practicum starting on Wednesday, you may potentially be changing jobs for the third time in the past 9 months, all your housemates are gone for the weekend and you're lonely, you're lonely even when all your housemates are here. All of the above, if you're me. You wonder if you used up all your kitchen mojo making that really delicious herb quick bread a couple hours ago. Either way, your attempt at dinner goes down the drain, the belch of the garbage disposal seeming to say that even it doesn't want it. Your rice, however, came out perfectly.

And that's when you do it. That's when you have plain steamed rice for dinner, seasoned with a little bit of fish sauce and sesame oil. You make some chai tea to soften the blow of your finished dinner product being a bowl of plain rice. You think nostalgically of the days when ruining dinner gave you a free pass to order in...back when you had a guaranteed job and your parents were paying for your schooling and you didn't have rent to pay. You write blog entries where you amp up the drama of the situation, because humor is the best medicine, and you hope that new readers to the blog don't think you're always this overdramatic (and also self-referencing).


The upside: my parents are coming to take me out to brunch tomorrow. And after a dinner like that, I'll definitely be hungry!