Life Skills

I consider myself a pretty competent person when it comes to household stuff. I can cook most simple things, I can do the laundry, I can sweep, vacuum, plunge a toilet. But this Monday exposed my three greatest weaknesses: my inability to peel a potato; my difficulty in flipping food with a spatula; and my complete ignorance of how to fix things that are broken. On our Bologna group, when we learn something that we should know how to do already, we jokingly call out "Life skills! Life skills!" (Unfortunately, this mostly pertains to me. I'm not sheltered you guys honest! Actually I am. But I at least knew how to do my laundry and cook pasta by freshman year of college, which is more than I can say for some of my friends.)

Anyway. This Monday, some of us had our cooking class with Rita, a professional chef who makes us delicious things and then we spend hours at her house talking to her and then she makes us eat more delicious things. One of the things we made that night was mashed potatoes. And Rita expected me to peel a potato, not with an Amerkan yuppy potato peeler, but with a paring knife. Doom. Death. Destruction. Then she realized I was a lefty and said that was my mistake. (!!!) And then she told a totally hilarious story about how, in ye olden days, if a girl wanted to marry a guy, she would go to his mother and show her that she could peel an apple. And alas I would have been a spinster. This is why my family is Russian-Polish. Similar hilarity ensued when I attempted to flip some veal that was frying in a pan. As we were leaving after our delicious dinner, she ruffled my hair, and I'm not sure if that was an, "You're adorable, I really like you" ruffle or an, "Oh, poverina! Your mamma never taught you how to cook!") Most likely the latter.

Then, when I came home, one of my room mates asked me about what was going on in the sink. I had done some laundry in the sink that weekend and the water hadn't gone down. I kept waiting and waiting, but no dice. Monday morning, my room mate had handed me a bottle of Italian Draino and told me to fix the sink. I've never had to deal with broken things before, especially clogged drains, because hello, that's what the super is for. I know this makes me sound incredibly spoiled, but it's... kind of true. Anyway, I poured some Draino in the sink and thought I had done my job. When I came back home Monday,  not only had the water not gone away, but there was more water. Arrgh. I told my room mate and she was all, "What?! You have to take the water out first?" I was so flustered from the cooking lesson and so upset that my room mates were angry at me that I went ahead and started getting all of the water out of the sink... even though it was in the middle of another room mate's birthday party! (The stars were truly aligned for me that day.) Anyway, one of their guy friends went to help me, and by help me I mean finish the job for me.

Life skills.

In other news, I joined a gym. Awww yeah. But it's a scary gym. When they sign up, they give you a leather binder that contains a workout diary, an instruction manual for all of the machines, and a book that tells you how to eat a "balanced" diet and contains evil recipes from an evil Australian spa. I say this only because I'm convinced that most diets are created so the morbidly wealthy can worry about something other than their lack of having anything to do all day. I just ate salty crackers with delicious sausage on them and a Baci for desert, something that I'm sure Fitness First would not approve of. They can go suck it.