Life Is Too Short To Spend In A Kitchen

The freezer is forlorn - a lone package of red beans and rice, a box of breakfast sandwiches, a half dozen foil wrapped drumsticks. Below isn't much better - a carton of diet Coke in small glass bottles and a week's worth of chocolate milk. How I haven't succumbed to malnutrition or coronary artery disease is a mystery.

The fact is, cooking is troublesome, messy, and time consuming. My Betty Crocker Cookbook for Young Adults sits gathering dust - I remember once looking up how long to cook hamburgers, and once how to make a cream sauce, I may have actually been a Young Adult at the time - but apart from that, I have no use for it. Cooking simply doesn't excite, inspire or provoke me. As a result, the cabinets are cluttered with mismatched dinnerware and the drawers are filled with a haphazard collection of partial sets of steak knives and stainless. I have table linens I've never used and have discovered that napkin rings make quite acceptable cat toys. The domesticity that comes so easily to others has always eluded me - not that I've ever gone in search of it - but I suspect I may be a gene or two short on the home front. White picket fences and motherhood have never appealed to me, kitchens are foreign lands. With two lukewarm marriages behind me, I sometimes wonder if there weren't warning signs I overlooked. I'm easy prey for falling in love but not much good at the required maintenance of a long term partnership and if a man expects to be fed in my house, he'd better be ready to do the cooking.

I suspect we all shine at the things we love and neglect that which we don't. Looking back, I can see that the traditional marriage and the tried and true American dream wasn't for me. I get restless and want to move on, to the next house or the next city, the next great love or the next brief affair. I hate the thought of getting stuck, of routines or sameness or life without a sense of adventure. Ironically, the very things I hate are also the things that bring me the most comfort - being stuck,
routines, the predictable nature of a quiet and relatively reclusive life. Wanderlust and security have always been warring factions in my life.

We are creatures with hidden sides and many layers, frequently pulled in opposing directions and changing moods and mindsets as we go. Still, we have our principles and life is too short to be spent in a kitchen - or in any other single room.