34. Fleet Feast Friday #2
It's Friday, and I'm back with a few off-the-cuff fleeting anecdotes about my hilarious life, one of which is the story I mentioned about cooking for my friend when she injured her back.
Episode theme music “The Easy Winners” by Raphaël Angelini
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TRANSCRIPT
Welcome back to Friday Fleet Feast number two. That's a nice alliteration. Fa Fa Fa.
Okay, so I haven't done a pet peeve in a while, so I'm going to do that pet peeve number…I don't know, #1 today.
Okay, so I don't even want to do research to find out who started this insanity. That's how much I loathe it.
Who in the hell came up with this horrible, highly overused tagline?
“Just changing the world one [something something] at a time.”
I mean, come on, people. It's really old. A million people have used it. Why do you think this is good? Why do you think that tagline is going to help you?
Just, you know, changing the world one sandwich at a time.
No, you're not.
No, you're not.
That is the dumbest thing I've ever heard.
Now, as soon as I say that, this thought swooshes into my head, “But Jenée, remember that cute story you love so much about the starfish?”
Well, you know, this is the story about the young man that's walking out on an early morning.
The beach is littered with starfish that have been washed up on the shore, and he sees an older man picking up starfish and throwing them one by one into the ocean.
He approaches the guy, and he's like, “Hey buddy, are you trying to get all these starfish back in the ocean? Because you know the sun's gonna come up pretty quickly, and they're just gonna all fry here. It doesn't really matter what you're doing. Doesn't matter because you're never gonna save them all.”
And the old man looks at the little guy, and he bends down, and he picks up a starfish and looks at it, and he says, “It matters to this one.”
And then he tosses it into the sea.
Okay. The sentimentality around that I love to the point of if I think it through (like I'm just saying it stream of consciousness right now), but when I really sit with that story—most likely made up, but it was proving a really beautiful point—I get touched by that. It's really beautiful.
Now, that's not a tagline, it's a story, but people have said, when I’ve…because I've complained about this dam “changing the world one da da da at a time.”
Stop using that. It's an overused, hideous tagline from hell. It needs to stop. It needs to go away. Use the word ‘I’ in 'I love you,' and please stop using that tagline.
Okay, rant over.
Now on to Fleet Feast Friday, number two. (Say that three times fast).
Okay, so you know how on Wednesday when I said I was talking in the episode about analog evenings, and I mentioned one of the inspirations for dedicating my evenings to no digital and all analog was because I wanted to cook better? I want to learn how to cook well. I literally warm stuff up because, as I told you, my girlfriend is an amazing cook, and she cooks for everyone, including me.
On this note of cooking, I also mentioned to you a story about… or alluded to a story about having to cook for my best friend when she hurt her back.
Well, this is that story.
I'm living in Seattle. She's living in Portland, but at the time, she's up in LaConner, Washington, which is about, I don't know, two and a half hours north of Seattle.
I don't really remember how far north it is, but it's not like just driving across town.
Anyway, she hurts her back, and she can't do anything, and she needs help, and I wanted to spend time with her anyway. So, of course, I drive up.
Her back was bad, right? Like she was…this wasn't just something where she needed Advil and a heating pad. She was in really bad shape.
So I'm doing pretty much everything. Like I even think I walk her to bed at night. She's in; she's really bad.
Okay, so…but I need to preface this.
Remember I said in my other episode that she hated to cook worse than I did? I mean, like when we were college roommates, I think she ate cereal and popcorn only.
So the fact that this woman is suddenly cooking and is actually a Wonder of Wonder, Miracle of Miracles cook, I mean, she’s… I'm blown away by it. Like she's so good at.
Okay, so she's lying on her back in the living room (we’ve made a little pallet on the floor because she can't do shit), and I'm being instructed by her as I'm in the kitchen, and she's lying on the floor.
Now let me also say we're not just making something like stew or chili. We're making a fully dressed, pull out the guts of some chicken or turkey or, I don't know, some poultry that I have to like literally get all the stuff out and then dress it with butter and herbs and rosemary.
I mean, I think I even had to go out and pick stuff off the bushes, like it was an ordeal.
It was as if I was some executive chef preparing a farm-to-table dining experience or something.
Okay. So dead meat isn't a hard thing to get around for me, but I will have to say there is something super gross about stuffing anything underneath the skin of anything else.
It just doesn't feel right.
So I'm having to do this to this winged thing that I'm dressing.
So I do all this, and I'm using my hands, and you know, running back and forth and washing things, and she's going, “Oh, and do this…” And I'm like, “Well, hang on, I'm still cutting up the chard.”
So it's funny like it's hilarious. I don't think at the time it was funny. I think at the time, it was slightly stressful for us both because this is a woman who liked control over her kitchen, and I'm like…she’s in massive pain, and I'm a novice right in the kitchen. I'm using sharp knives. What the hell? I mean, that's terrifying to anyone who knows me.
So long story short, I complete the meal. It's lovely. It's actually really delicious. I was quite impressed.
But what's interesting is, what the hell? We weren't having guests over. She wasn't cooking some gourmet dinner to, you know, entice a romantic love interest or some guy she was interested in.
No, it was just me and Barb. Yeah.
So this weekend in O'Connor was unbelievably hilarious and…
I can still see her on the floor.
So she's a devoted podcast listener to my Mind Chalks, and she texts me the other day after the Analog Evenings episode ran, and she says, “Hey when you mentioned that you thought of a story about cooking between you and me, I thought you were going to talk about the time you, me, and Schaef cooked lasagna for the college.
So we're on a Catholic retreat in college, and we are responsible for cooking lasagna for, I don't know, 40 or 60 people on this retreat.
I don't really remember how many people there were, but it wasn't two people. It wasn't a small group. So we do the lasagna, right? We get the pans, the ricotta cheese, and all that, right?
We cut everything into little squares…
Now, back in the day, we used styrofoam bowls, and remember those styrofoam bowls?
Yeah. Nobody'd be caught dead now because they're not eco-friendly, but we used 'em back then.
So do Father Dan runs in, he's like, “Hey, wait a minute. One of the talks is running long. We're gonna be running late for dinner.”
And we're like, “Okay. All right.”
So we realize we can't just leave this stuff out. It's gonna get cold. And we didn't have microwaves back then. We didn't have all these luxuries.
So we're thinking, “Okay, well, we will…"
We put all the things on cookie trays and just put 'em back into the oven, and…
Yeah, you can see where this is going.
Dan comes back in, and we're getting ready to eat, so we get all the salads ready, and we go to pull out the lasagna, and…
Yeah, I don't even need to go any further.
Basically, we had to pick out the baked-in styrofoam, and we couldn't even discern some of it from the cheese. Melted white styrofoam kind of becomes like cheese.
So we pretty much poisoned the entire retreat.
You know, we didn't tell anybody either, by the way. We didn't even tell Dan until years later. Because we were so aghast.
Had we like chunked it all, they would've gotten garlic bread and salad.
And don't even get me started about how many other stories we have like this—especially with Barb and Schaef and I; I mean, I can think of one right now that involves, again, Dan and the Bishop of Springfield, Missouri.
Yeah, that was really fun. That was…well, that’s for another time.
Okay. I will see you on Monday.
I hope you have an amazing weekend and thank you so much for being here with me. I hope you enjoyed Friday Fleet Feast 2. There'll be more.
See you Monday.