Attack of the Pizza Dough

There are many excellent reasons why I do not cook. And one is not because I'm a feminist who is trying to break the gender roles. Mostly the reason why I spend as little time as possible in a kitchen is because food hates me.

Now, I know you can argue that food hates everybody. While it does give us energy, the good-for-the-soul food makes us pack on the pounds. But really, food hates me so much that it actively seeks to destroy me.

Last night I was helping my mom make dinner. I am attempting to learn the basics so I am not relying on dining hall hours and Taco Bell for nourishment when I get an apartment this fall. We weren't even making anything difficult...just paninis and instant noodles. My mom was busy prepping the sandwiches for our handy dandy panini maker. She told me to start on the noodles. The instructions were beyond simple, so I thought I could handle it.

Step one: bring water, milk, and butter (optional) to a boil.

Right. Easy. I bring water to a boil all the time for Ramen Noodles.

I do everything perfectly and am trying to break up the butter while the water is heating up. I forget the reason why, but I turn around for, literally, two seconds. When I face the stove once more, the water-milk-butter concoction is rising rapidly to the top of the pan, frothing and bubbling in resentment for not giving it enough attention.

Panic sets in and I can't for the life of me think of what I can do to stop the mess from spilling over. I ferociously twist the burner to medium heat, but even in my distress I know it won't be enough.

"Mom! Help!" I scream.

Now here is the thing about my mom. Her mind is full of 50,000 thoughts, all running through at the same time. So sometimes when you talk to her, she doesn't respond until you are halfway through a thrilling tale about a customer from work, saying, "Sorry, what?"

At the time of the over boiling, my mother's mind was not permitting her to be conscious of the world around her. Futilely, I yelled, "Help! Help! Help!" I could not tear my eyes away from the water now at the brink of escape, still I knew help wouldn't come. This is when, for some reason, my subconscious tapped into my two semesters of college Spanish. "Ayuda! Ayuda! Ayuda!"*

The ridiculous part, more so than my last resort as a girl born and raised in Missouri to start shouting in Spanish as a distress signal, is that my mother immediately responded to a foreign language she could barely count to ten in. Sure, English she can completely ignore, but once the Spanish rolls out she is all ears. Still in my panic, I conserved this nugget of information for later attention-getting use.

My mother ran over and moved the volcano mixture from the burner, scolding me for not doing that before, then asked, "What the hell were you shouting at me?"

I quickly explained what my mind decided to perform, she made jokes at my expense, and we continued on with dinner. Of course with my luck, this was not the last incident of the night.

The noodles turned out okay and I started helping my mom with the sandwiches. She had just bought avocados and tried to cut into one for a spread on the panini, but they were too ripe. I remembered we had a package of store bought guacamole in the meat drawer of our refrigerator and went to get it. It took some digging around due to how packed our fridge is, but I finally extricated it and handed it over.

I started to shove the drawer shut and I think the motion is what set it off. There was an earsplitting bang and I felt a blast of wind. Shrapnel hit my neck and face. I could feel it embedding into my hair. I stood in shock, my hands curled oddly in the air close to my face. I analyzed the fridge and saw the culprit of the bomb. It was a pizza dough can that had been standing upright and sealed on a shelf. Now it was pointed at me, like a cannon after a firing, with dough spilling out of the exploded top.

The shock still controlled me and I stood there, shaking slightly as I stared at the fridge. I could feel my mom whirling around me. Eventually she asked why I was standing there. Excited tears stung my eyes as I said, "Thedoughcanexplodedatme!" My mom was in her own thoughts again and didn't register what I said (that and I was talking really fast and in a high soprano).

I ran to the mirror in the living room to evaluate the damage. My neck was stinging all over and I saw angry red blotches covering the skin there. Small bits of dough were tangled in my hair and dotting my face.

"Oh, the pizza dough exploded?" my mom called casually from the kitchen.

With insane laughter I ran back in, shouting about how the pizza dough was a bomb that tried to kill me. I yanked my high collar shirt out of the way to give her a better view of the red marks and yelled about how much my neck was stinging.

My mother made more jokes at my expense, and my brother told me to shut up since he was online playing Call of Duty.

I took this night as a resolution of why I do not cook. The food is ready to attack me if I come anywhere near it.

*For all you Spanish speaking peoples, I know that's technically wrong. But I only had two semesters of Spanish, and it was a year ago. That was the first version of "help" that came out. Yes, "Socorro!" would have been more appropriate, but what my subconscious wants my subconscious does.

The Hunger Games and New Books

Song of the Post: United States Of Eurasia/Collateral Damage by Muse

Book of the Post: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

Just like the movie Julie and Julia, my official readers are my mother and her friend. That's fine though, since this is more of an exercise in voice than a popularity contest. Plus my mom shrieks with indignation whenever I say I might delete the account.

I'll start this post with my new feature at the top of this: song and book postings. I love reading. I love music. I think the two go hand in hand, especially when you find a song that fits a book perfectly. Which is why my iPod is full of book playlists. The same goes for writing and music.

I feel like this Muse song matches the tone of The Hunger Games perfectly. I'm sure if I were to investigate it further (which I guarantee I will), most Muse songs would fit this novel beautifully.

I've had The Hunger Games for awhile (stolen from my 14 year old brother...don't tell). Having heard the insane internet hype around this book, I have avoided reading it since I knew it would take up a lot of my time, and mind. Proven correct, I spent my entire day reading it.

Words currently can't describe my love of this book, there is too much obsession. This is how it is for me when I read new books. I can't focus on anything else until I finish the book, which was trying when I was reading Gone with the Wind during a very hard semester at college. This is especially true for when I first read Harry Potter, Twilight, The Time Traveler's Wife, The Lovely Bones, This Lullaby, The Things They Carried, Gone with the Wind, and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (my favorite book for those curious). And with the exception of Gone with the Wind, I read all of these books before they were hyped up. Some still aren't, as is the case with The Things They Carried and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

This is primarily why I have a horrible habit of loving books and re-reading them a thousand times before moving onto a new one. I know a new book will take up 85% of my life until I finish it. Even once I finish the blasted thing, simply thinking about it takes up 43% of my life. I will often cancel social plans to read/obsess. Yes, I chose fictional people over real people. More on that in another post.

The other reason for me not starting new books is my impossibility to put a book down halfway through and never finish it. Just like I hate stopping/walking out of movies without finishing them. No matter how bad the book is, I simply have to finish it or it gnaws at me.

I wonder if I am the only one with this problem. I won't have an answer for a while, since I know my mom basically sticks with Stephen King and Stephenie Meyer (a hilarious conundrum for those who know about the Stephen vs Stephenie battle) and her friend doesn't like reading novels. But if anyone ever reads this besides them two, please let me know if you have this problem, and then recommend some books that don't deserve to be put down, along with their probable obsession level (a scale of one to ten would do fine).

There's a first time for everything

Yeah. So. I'm blogging. *scratches head*

I really don't know what I'm doing here. This was a very spur of the moment decision to search "blog" on Givoogle (more on that later, I think.). The whole idea was presented to me at an annual Christmas party. The conversation went something like this:

My cousin: "What are you planning on majoring in?"

Me: "English in Writing."

My cousin: "That's cool, but...well I hate to say this, but there are not many jobs out there for English majors."

Me (sighing internally): "I get that, but there's not much else I enjoy enough to study that extensively."

My cousin: "You know what you should do?"

Me: "What's that?"

My cousin: "Start a blog."

Me (laughing): "I don't have anything to say that anyone would care about reading. Plus, I thought blogs were a little 2002. Like Xanga."

My cousin: "No, blogs are really popular. It can't hurt to try."

And that brings me to now, sitting at my computer with stacks of CD's to add to my iTunes and tons of stories in my head to write.

Hmm.

I should probably explain more about myself, I suppose.

I am nineteen, turning twenty in May. I live in Missouri. I have a full ride scholarship to a local community college, but this fall I am transferring to University of Missouri - Columbia. And my dream career is to be a novelist, my backup career is non-existent.

Go ahead, laugh at my impracticality. I'll wait.

...

Okay, you good? All out of your system? Awesome, moving right along.

I don't know what I am going to write about or how consistent the posts will be. But I think it might be good practice. Like stretching before working out, I could write blogs to encourage me to write more on my own fictional stories. Perhaps even post excerpts and get feedback from any readers I might maybe get.

I'll promise up front that I won't write about boring teenage/early twenties drama. For example: "Like O-M-G! Billy TOTALLY smiled at me today!" or "Like O-M-G! Edward Cullen is so perfect and Taylor Lautner is so sexy!"

Even though I am a Twilight fan. Once again, laugh. I shall wait.

...

This time I'm cutting off your laughter. If you are still reading this nonsensical post, that is.

Allow me to explain the title of this blog, called "The Labyrinth." It took a while to even think of an idea, since I have no idea where I'm going with this. "The Labyrinth" is a reference to a favorite book of mine by author/vlogger John Green titled Looking for Alaska. Here is the specific quote I was considering:

"You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining the future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present."

That's a small part of the book. The idea of life being "a labyrinth of suffering" runs throughout the entire novel. I feel like that is what my posts will generally be concerning...me finding a way through the labyrinth.

I'll wrap this up with what I mentioned at the beginning of the post: Givoogle. This is the same as Google, only it was created by Emerson Spartz and his fiancé Gaby Montero. Every time you search something on this site, advertisers pay these two lovely people money. The more people who search and see their ads, the more the advertisers pay the creators. Emerson and Gaby are donating 100% of the money they get from advertisements to help find a cure for cancer. To quote them: "If just 0.01% of people currently using Google switch to Givoogle, we can raise millions of dollars to fight cancer!" This search engine is set as my homepage and I talk about it as much as I can to get people to use it. So go use it, now, because I said so =)

Until next time, folks!