Competent? It Depends

Paper towels: always at the ready. We decorate with them.

 So yesterday my wife tells me that my blog's not that funny. This is a surprise to me, as I mostly think it's hilarious. I go back and read a few entries, and I think she's right. I'm not that funny—certainly not anywhere near as funny as I'd like to be.

I'm thinking about this problem while I'm trying to cook dinner. I've got some leftover yellow rice and peas that I'm going to reheat in the microwave to go with a couple of sauteed chicken cutlets. I don't want to microwave this stuff in the plastic storage container I got out of the fridge because heating stuff in those ruins them—not the food but the containers. They get etched and pitted, and you have to wonder where the missing plastic went. Actually I'm pretty sure I know where it went, and that's not something I want to be doing to myself when I've already had cancer once—not that uninhibited microwaving was the cause necessarily, but you never know so it's probably best to err on the side of caution. I decide to dump the rice and peas into a ceramic bowl and heat them up in that, only instead of spooning the rice and peas into the bowl, which would be the sane thing to do, I put the bowl, which is round, upside down on top of the storage container, which is square, and then I turn them both over at the same time so that the bowl is now on the bottom and the storage container is now on the top. As you may have surmised I now have a huge puddle of pea juice all over the counter that just spilled out of the gaps between the square container and the round bowl.

I really hate spillage. It's not just that spilling things slows you down, which it does because you have to clean it up before you can get on with your life. It's that spillage is evidence of incompetence. Wherever you see a puddle of something other than rain, you know someone has screwed up. Often, I find, it has been me. I leave evidence all over the place. There is evidence on the counter tops, on the furniture, on the floors, on my shirt. There is plenty more in the bathroom, but I don't even want to talk about that. Just based on spillage alone you would have to conclude that I am no longer a capable human being, that the simplest of tasks are now beyond me.

This is when it occurs to me that I am wasting my time writing stuff down to amuse myself, and hoping that other people will find it funny or edifying, and visit here in sufficient numbers that I can make some money. What I need to be doing instead is having my wife follow me around with a video camera to document my gradual slide into decrepitude. We will be rich in no time. The ad revenues from paper towel manufacturers alone will buy us a new house. I can't even imagine how much we're going to get from the folks over at Depends. I'll finally be able to buy that Aston Martin DB9 I've been wanting. I'll have to get plastic seat covers though.