While everyone else is out on the town, at the movies or at a bar, hanging out with friends, I decide to have a quiet night in and just relax. Just turn on the TV, cover myself with a warm blanket, and get Netflix on and marathon The Office. Can you believe I still haven't finished the series yet? It's going to happen tonight!
But first I decide to turn on the computer and check my email. See if there's anything interesting or important online. Maybe check the job boards, because who knows what's on there? Then I realize that I haven't applied for something I saw earlier this week, so I rush to open a Word doc and write a cover letter. I do some research on the company, look at my old cover letters, and labor over the spelling, grammar, and how the writing sounds. Oh, did I update my resume already? I double-check the email before I send, and then I find another listing I should check out. And another. It almost never ends. When were these posted? Oh gosh, there are just so many jobs to research and apply for. Okay, okay, I'll get to this later. Tomorrow. Maybe Monday. Anyway, I'm putting it off for now because tonight I'm finishing The Office.
So I bookmark a few pages I want to check back on and click off. Since my browser's open, I guess I'll just check what's on the Huffington Post. Really, this is what's happening in our world? Is Trump seriously the leading Republican candidate for the party right now? Why is Rubio making fun of his hands? This is what we've reduced to? I can't deal with this. Exit the window, exit now.
So I finally turn on the TV. I sit down and watch one episode, but I have to keep rewinding because my mind's on the job applications and the news coverage. I just can't concentrate. And soon I'm hungry and would like a snack. Ooh, maybe some cookies. Chocolate chip cookies! So I go to the fridge and take out two sticks of butter and two eggs, and then I begin to measure out flour and sugar in a bowl. Good thing I bought vanilla extract just yesterday, because we were out. I finish mixing up the dough with a light sheen of sweat on my brow, my arm tired now. In the fridge it goes now, perhaps until the oven finishes preheating.
I ready the cookie sheet by lining it with aluminum foil, but as I do so I pass all the used measuring cups and spoons and bowls, and I see that the sink is already full from the day. There is pasta sauce in some of those bowls, a hardened crust of something sticking to a plate, some leftover bits of meat and vegetables in a pan. I was basically baking in a room with a tub of dirty dishes right beside me. So I roll up my sleeves and turn on the water because I can't stand the look of them there. For good measure, I also wipe down the counter and refill the napkin holder. Then the oven finishes preheating, so I wash my hands again and roll out some dough balls to bake.
The leftover dough balls go back in the fridge, and I set the timer to go off in nine minutes. In the meantime, I pick up my old copy of Moby-Dick, an American classic that I've actually never read before. A pencil's already in my hand so I could take notes and underline parts of the text, and for a second I feel like I'm in school again, reading something dense and difficult that I definitely won't comprehend the first time around. Why am I doing this again? And why are they taking so long to get out on the sea? When do I get to the whale?
A smell reaches my nose and an alarm goes off somewhere. The cookies! I rush to the oven and open the door only to find black rounded shapes on the sheet. My alarm didn't go off for whatever reason, and now my cookies are burnt. I roll out more dough, my stomach angrily gurgling as I do so, and this time I check the clock on the microwave to make sure I knew when to check on the cookies if my timer doesn't go off again. Moby-Dick was a bad choice right now; I put it away.
I finally get the cookies out, and they've flattened so much more than I expected them to. Two dough balls had become one strange-looking cookie, and almost the whole sheet looks like that. I sigh. At least they'll taste fine, even if they look terrible.
I go back to the TV with my failed cookie in hand and a glass of milk, and turn on Netflix again because my PS3 signed me out. Time to de-stress after a stressful Saturday night now.
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