I’m going to give you the best piece of Adult Life Is Hard advice I’ve ever learned:
Talk to people when things go to shit.
I don’t just mean get it off your chest, although that’s good. I mean: Something’s wrong with your paycheck/you lost your job/you had unexpected emergency car repairs and now you’re broke so your credit card payment is late. Like, not just 15 days late. We’re talking, shit got crazy and now you’re 90 days late with compounded interest and late fees and the Minimum Payment Due is, like, $390, and you’ve got about $3.90 in your bank account. Call the credit card company.
I know it’s scary. I know you feel like you’re going to get in trouble, like you’re gong to get yelled at or scolded for not having your life together. But the credit card company isn’t your parents; they’re just interested in getting money from you. And you can’t squeeze blood from a stone or money from someone who doesn’t have any. So what you do is you call them. You explain you’re experiencing temporary financial hardships, and you’re currently unable to bring your account up to date, but you don’t want to just let it get worse. Can you maybe talk to someone about a payment plan so you can work something out? Nine times out of ten you’ll be able to negotiate something so that at least it’s not just taking a constant, giant shit on your credit score.
– Can’t pay your power bill? Call the power company.
– Can’t pay your full rent? Talk to your landlord.
– Had to go to the hospital without insurance and have giant medical bills looming in your place? Call the hospital and ask if they have someone who helps people with financial hardships. Many do.
– Got super sick and missed half a semester of class because flu/pneumonia/auto-immune problems/depressive episode? Talk to your professor. If that doesn’t help, talk to your advisor.
You may not be able to fix everything, but you’ll likely be able to make improvements. At the very least, it’s possible that they have a list of people you can contact to help you with things. (Also, don’t be afraid to google things like, “I can’t pay my power bill [state you live in]” because you’d be surprised at what turns up on Google!) But the thing is, people in these positions gain nothing if you fail. There’s no emotional satisfaction for them if your attempts at having your life together completely bite the dust. In fact, they stand to benefit if things work out for you! And chances are, they’ll be completely happy to take $20 a month from you over getting $0 a month from you, your account will be considered current because you’ve talked to them and made an agreement, you won’t get reported to a collections agency, and your credit score won’t completely tank.
Here’s some helpful tips to keep in mind:
1. Be polite. Don’t demand things; request them. Let me tell you about how customer service people hold your life in their hands and how many extra miles they’ll go for someone who is nice to them.
2. Stick to the facts, and keep them minimal unless asked for them. Chances are they’re not really interested in the details. “We had several family emergencies in a row, and now I’m having trouble making the payments” is better than “Well, two months ago my husband wrecked his bike, and then he had a reaction to the muscle relaxer they gave him, and then our dog swallowed a shoestring and we had to take him to the emergency clinic, and just last week MY car broke down, and now my account’s in the negatives and I don’t know how I’m gonna get it back out.” The person you’re talking to is aware shit happens to everyone; they don’t need the details to prove you’re somehow “worthy” of being helped. They may ask you for details at a certain point if they have to fill out any kind of request form, but let them do that.
3. Ask questions. “Is there anything we can do about X?” “Would it be possible to move my payment date to Y day instead so it’s not coming out of the same paycheck as my rent?” The answer may be “no.” That’s not a failure on your part. But a good customer service person may have an alternate solution.
Anyway! I hope that helps! Don’t just assume the answer is “no” before you’ve even begun. There is more help out there than you ever imagined.
Idk Clarice, maybe we’re just tired, and life is uncertain, and we like the idea of a stable husband with a steady job and a big dog and his own place away from all the loud, shapeshifting-kink party gods.
If men stopped working…the world would continue on.
If women stopped working, then things would get ugly.
What?
there has been an instance where this happened. it was 1975 and icelandic women decided not to work for one day.
working as in cooking, cleaning, taking care of the children, doing chores and so on, not only “not showing up to your workplace”. women did nothing that day, except showing up in reykjavik and protesting for gender equality, equal pay and equal representation in parliament, you know, cool stuff.
you know what happened? havoc. men were left with food to cook and children they never took care of to pick up from kindergarden and entertain for the day. they went en masse to the food shops buying sausages because they could cook nothing else, they had to bond with children they never spent more than a couple hours a day with. they struggled combining their work day and the domestic tasks they had to sort out. and this just for one day.
iceland in 1975 stopped working and things indeed got ugly. so ugly that women in the following decades became woke AF and soon it happened that women became president, took half of the seats in parliament and achieved one of the best living environments in the world.
It’s the sixth grade. Somehow, I had come across a catalogue for the store they bought all the school store crap from. You know, the smelly erasers and dumb keychains that they sell for like a buck apiece. So I somehow got this catalogue, and little old entrepreneur me was like “I should buy something from this and sell it at school for an absurdly high price to gain basically pure profit.” As sixth graders do. So I bought two huge tubs full of these keychains called Jellybears. This is what they look like.
So I bought a metric fuckton of these assholes for about 20 cents a piece. I start selling them at school for a buck fifty. Like I said, pure profit. 6th grade me was brilliant. I broke even in like eight seconds of me whippin these bad boys out at school. Saying these are were a hit is an understatement. They were like a home run triple, or some other sports metaphor. People are buying this shit at lunch time, between classes. Shit, one girl even admitted to selling the ones she bought off me around her neighborhood for like five bucks. I was happy to be the middleman, but I digress. The point is, not only did I gain entrepreneurial skills, I also made a pretty penny. However, a month into my brilliant business, I get a call down to the office.
I had never been called to the office before. I was such a goody two-shoes you wouldn’t believe. This was in a school that boasted like two fights per week. The ratio of cops and administrators to students was like 1:3. And there were 1700 people at this school. That’s a whole lot of authority figures for a whole lot of miscreants and ne’er-do-wells. And here I was, reading large pretentious books and wearing polo shirts, with a gigantic backpack and in an advanced math class. I was, and still am, a lame weeny. Just wanted to put that in perspective.
Anyway, I was called down to the office that day. Literally shaking in the huge chair they had for me, facing down the terrifying vice-principal, she pulled out a Jellybear.
It was the DIVA one, if I’m not mistaken. I was then given a good lecture about how I’m not allowed to sell things on campus without explicit permission, yadda yadda, the whole spiel. Except I felt there was something fishy about the whole thing. Maybe it was how she held the Jellybear in her hand, perhaps it was the way she confiscated the rest of them.
After asking around with the intense gossip network of middle school, I discovered the real reason the administration confiscated the Jellybears.
They had reason to suspect I was filling them with vodka.
They had reason to suspect that I, the tiny, stupid haired, braces-clad sixth grader who played a tuba bigger than she was was the head of a sophisticated alcohol distributing cartel in which I punctured and drained the goop from cute keychains, refilled them with straight vodka with a syringe, sealed them off with no trace, and sold them around school.
I’m not sure if I’m flattered that they assumed me capable of that sort of espionage, or insulted that they thought me dumb enough to sell middle schoolers straight vodka for A BUCK FIFTY.
really who did they think i was i was in advanced math for petes sake.
defending each other to scathing tertiary or otherwise minor characters but ONLY WHEN THE OTHER ISN’T AROUND
reincarnation or time loop or OOOOH TIME TRAVEL SCENARIOS
dramatically saving each other from certain death or barely surviving something that almost makes the other break down and just smirking wearily and mumbling flippant smartass remarks to HIDE THE DEPTH OF THEIR FEELINGS
undercover as lovers, the classic
ALMOST KISSING. like getting so close that they start to close their eyes and hold their breath and then SOMETHING HAPPENS and they jump apart, that is MORE VALUABLE THAN ANY ACTUAL KISSING
casually sitting on each other’s laps during ensemble cast conversations or scenes
that thing kirk does in tos where something really intense might be going on or he might be stressed/upset but then he looks over to spock and his expression immediately melts into a warm smile and his eyes sparkle bc spock gives him so much comfort and just the sight of him is immediately grounding murders me every time ugH
i keep mentioning the bread pudding incident and not telling the full story and at some point i really should
Yes you should.
im procrastinating so i will tell the story.
despite the incident in question happening about a year and a half ago, it has two preceding incidents, the contents of which are needed in order to understand the full scale of the bread pudding incident.
two facts about me:
1) i recently found
out i have what was described to me as “the worst case of adhd that
(my therapist) had ever seen”, totally unmedicated and,
2) i cannot reliably
count to ten.
so a couple years
ago, i tried to get into box-baking. my husband is an incredible
baker, and has made some awesome things (including one time a
pancake-based strawberry shortcake for my birthday because i hate
cake? he’s a gem) but he doesnt always have energy to bake and i
crave brownies literally at
every minute of every hour of every day, so i was like ok sick ill
bake box brownies. thats easy. (i have since, with a liberal amount of help, learned how to reliably box bake precisely one brand of brownie)
the
first time, i misread the instructions and made them with the oil and
water reversed and only one egg. they were inedible. the second time
i realized we had no eggs ¾ of the way through, panicked, put in
applesauce but only half the required applesauce, and they came out (mostly) inedible.
so
at the time my sister sensibly decided “you cannot bake any more”
and i sensibly agreed with her.
last year in the deep swings of my masters-induced depression i
figured i had forgotten about a loaf of french bread in my fridge for
weeks and it was approximately the same hardness as a stone. i should
use it for something! bread pudding. that is what you use stale
bread for.
i
cook to taste—i rarely use recipes, because of the aforementioned
“i have the attention span of a gnat and i cannot count to ten”
so using a recipe? pretty much useless. this does not work
to bake. so i googled a recipe,
figured, okay, i can get the ingredients, and pretty much guess? i closed the recipe immediately afterward, and forgot my laptop even existed within minutes.
things
bread pudding requires: stale bread. butter. milk. sugar. cinnamon.
raisins. eggs. vanilla. and, if you are southern™, alcohol.
things
i had in the house: stale bread. margarine. sugar. pumpkin spice. one
egg. vanilla. alcohol.
first
i broke up the bread. with a hammer! like you do, for weeks-old
french bread. i put it all in a casserole dish, because that was what
was clean. no milk? water is fine! throw that shit in! how much
water? i dont know. enough to get it wet! submerge all the
ingredients. how much sugar? i don’t know. the recipe said brown
sugar.
me:
can i use the brown sugar to make bread pudding? james:
sure. but don’t use much. me:
ok. (takes less than a teaspoon of brown sugar, one of the big-ish
clumps) that’s enough, right? throw that in there. that’s enough
sugar! i don’t need more white sugar.
pumpkin
spice is essentially cinnamon! can’t use too much vanilla. just
shake a little bit in there. that’s good, that’s enough. how much
was that? two drops? plenty! that’s how much vanilla it needs,
right? how much margarine? i don’t know! i closed the recipe. let’s
get three or four big pats. i don’t have any stick margarine. crack
that egg in there.
can’t
forget the whiskey! just slop some in there. i’m southern. a
dollop? a dollop. a dollop sounds right.
what
temperature do you cook bread budding at? i don’t know. this
casserole dish is only barely like, a tiny bit full. just coating the
bottom. not much, then. 250 is probably right?
and
then i forgot i was cooking until the kitchen began to smell.
the
object which was removed from the oven was approximately the same
size and density as a bowl full of very, very burned sand. two square inches of it was the correct texture
for bread pudding—i.e, soft, squishy. the rest of it was as
like unto hardened lava, and the same color. a single taste revealed
it to taste like wet, disgusting bread or almost sort of exactly-unlike-bread-pudding but in the saddest way imaginable, the potential had been there, and had not been achieved. the brown sugar had not even dissolved it was just there. in a chunk. burned into the bread. it
all smelled strongly
of whiskey. it took about three weeks to soak totally off of my
casserole dish, full of daily-replaced soapy
boiling water.
so
i’m not allowed to bake any more.
This is the most “Cooking while ADHD” thing I’ve ever read and I feel much better about Switching “3 Eggs & 4 cups flour” to “4 eggs and 3 Cups flour” earlier this morning.
@comicreliefmorlock At last, the carrot cake donut incident has met its rival.
I AM NOT ALONE IN THIS WORLD
{idk if it rivals the Chocolate Rat King tho…}
…carrot cake donut?
I knew this day would come.
I knew I would have to write this down at some point.
Now, I bake. And I actually bake fairly well. (Wuffie’s birthday cakes for the last two years have been pretty damn good, thank you very much.) Occasionally, I’m prone to having sudden feelings of Adequacy and believing that I can take on a Cooking Challenge without incident.
The night of the Carrot Cake was one of those times.
When I lived in Lubbock with my second ex, we managed to get an absolutely glorious apartment that I positively adored. (I do, however, love my current apartment as much because there’s less of it to clean.) The only quirk about it was the kitchen: we had a bar that opened into the front hall, only one actual counter to speak of, cabinets in odd places and the oven was across from the fridge. You couldn’t open one if the other was open and things occasionally got awkward. But having A Kitchen inspired me often to take on Proper Baking.
I can’t, however, blame this Incident on the kitchen. Or the cats. At the time, we had four: Nommers, Riley, Laurie and Chi. Out of the four, only Laurie was a genuine busybody. She had to be in everyone’s business and always wanted to be In the Know if something was Going On.
Around eleven P.M. one Friday night, I got the urge to bake. And while I am not a huge fan of carrot cake–point in fact, I positively hate it now–I’d been watching something that gave me the notion that I wanted to bake a goddamn carrot cake. I was GOING to bake a goddamn Carrot Cake.
Without a cookbook, it was up to the internet to provide me with a recipe that I dutifully copied down in the shorthand only I understand. Information solidly in hand, I went to the kitchen and began pulling out ingredients to start the batter.
Up until the point I mixed the first batch of plain cake batter, this was a success. I could have just quit then and kept my belief in myself.
I did not quit then.
The positioning of the bar was slightly problematic due to the inquisitive calico who wanted to know wtf Mommy was doing, I was distracted from Cake Baking by Defending Batter from Cat. The fact that it was right above the only real USABLE counter space in the whole kitchen didn’t help in the slightest.
I turned away from the bowl of plain batter to consult my recipe scribbles and Laurie faceplanted right into the fucking bowl.
A cat that has just faceplanted into a goddamn bowl of anything is nOT A CALM CAT. Flinging batter EVERYWHERE and meowing outrage at the top of her lungs, Laurie managed to flip herself out of the bowl and onto the counter, getting batter (and cat fur) all over the place.
Wrangling her into the sink, I rinsed the cake batter off of her, gave her a half-assed toweling with a dish towel and pitched her angry butt out of the kitchen. Serves you right, you moronic feline.
Realizing that I now had half the batter I’d started with, I checked the batter in the bowl for cat hair–when you have had cats for over a decade, you honestly stop giving much of a fuck about their fur in your food–and scraped out some batter that looked questionable.
I still had about a fourth a bowl of batter, so okay. Not a total loss, and there was plenty of flour, sugar, etc. in the house from my previous quest to bake a Diabetic-Friendly Pecan Pie for my father when my parents had visited. (THAT had gone marvelously.) I was the only one who really used the “baking” cupboard and clearly I put EVERYTHING back where it’d been before, so I grabbed what I needed, flung ingredients into the bowl and mixed with a will.
With the cake batter once again ready, I realized two things: carrot cake has carrot in it and all we had were baby carrots. Well, they’re still carrots. They’ll work.
Knowing perfectly well that my capability with kitchen knives is minimal at best, I elected to grab the cheese grater and just grate the carrots into the batter. Estimating how many baby carrots would make the required amount of carrot for the cake was more of a “ehhhhhh, just… like two cups of these, right?” than actual SCIENCE, but oh well.
There would be a fucking carrot cake baked.
Two things were VERY quickly established: baby carrots are slippery and cheese graters are excellent at grating more than just food objects.
After the fourth slip–and bleeding copiously all over the fucking carrots and almost into the damn batter–my temper got the better of me. It wasn’t exactly chopping that I did. Or slicing. More like ‘manically slaughtering baby carrots in a fit of incompetent rage.’
This was a mistake on my part. Not simply because I now had skinned fingers and there were bits of carrot flying around. But because I was so focused on murdering the carrots that I didn’t notice The Calico Returned.
Laurie was not, on average, a stupid cat. She had some idiotic habits–forgetting that the glass doors leading to the balcony were actual barriers and not mystic portals was understandable–but she was not prone to making the same grave mistakes twice in a row.
Except when cake batter was involved.
I noticed a paw going for the batter about the time I was hacking my way through the last-ish baby carrots. Instinctively, I yelled “NO!”
This was a mistake.
Laurie’s precarious balance on the edge of the narrow bar was thrown off by her attempt to flee the Voice of Discipline. Rather than gracefully leaping to the ground, the cat went ass-first into the bowl of batter.
After extracting Laurie’s claws from my face and rinsing her off YET AGAIN, I locked her in the goddamn bedroom because this was just getting ridiculous. Stomping back into the kitchen, I assessed the damage.
Half the batter: now on the counter, floor, sink and me. Cake pans: greased and floured and spattered with batter and bits of carrot Carrots: …chopped? ish? Me: bloody, smeared with batter and cat fur, speckled with carrot bits, cranky af
Salvaging one round of batter from cat fur was one thing, but this batch had already been tainted AND now had been ignominiously garnished with cat ass. This batch was not going to work.
Dumping it out, I rinsed the bowl and began using my rapidly depleting stock of ingredients to mix up another batch. In the flailing round of the PREVIOUS batter batch, I had neglected to put the cinnamon back in the cabinet.
It was still sitting on the counter.
Where I did not see it.
However, there was a red-capped bottle with a similar label right where the cinnamon should’ve been, so I grabbed that, measured out a rough amount and dumped it into the batter.
It wasn’t until I started mixing that I realized what I’d dumped into the cake batter was NOT, in fact, dark brown like cinnamon should be. It was a weird greyish-green.
I looked at the label.
Italian Seasoning.
Swearing loudly enough to spook one of the properly behaving cats out of the dining room, I scooped out as much of the Italian seasoning as I could find and found the cinnamon on the counter rather than in the cabinet where it SHOULD have been, regardless of my failure to put it back.
For good measure, I dumped in double the cinnamon needed, added more sugar and went hunting for anything I could add that might overpower whatever bits of incorrect seasoning might be lingering.
Cloves? Cloves are a fall spice, right? Ginger? Ginger goes in sweet things. There’s like… candied ginger and all that. Nutmeg? That goes right along with cloves.
Flinging any spice that looked like it was a) not Italian and b) might be a ‘fall’ spice left me with batter that was ominously brown. I was undeterred and poured batter into my cake pans. Realized I hadn’t pre-heated the oven. Did a frantic search for Incoming Calico. Remembered the Calico was locked in the bedroom (and meowing irritably because of that.) Pre-heated the oven. Smoked a cigarette. Congratulated myself.
I congratulated myself right until I left the kitchen, cake pans in the oven, and sat down to keep watching ‘American Horror Story.’ Finding myself without a beverage, I strolled back into the kitchen–the state of the kitchen is best left to the imagination–and saw the haphazardly ‘chopped/grated’ carrots still sitting in a measuring cup on the counter.
Fuck my life.
At this point, it could have been left alone. The cake pans were in the oven, the batter was baking and okay, spice cake, fine. It’ll be all right. Spice cake is just as good as carrot cake, maybe better!
But I had bled for those carrots, and they were going into the cake.
Wrenching the oven door open, I dumped the carrots into the cake pans and stirred partially-baked-cake-batter-and-carrots until the whole thing looked …reasonably? smooth.
After struggling to get the oven door unstuck from the fridge door, I considered this A Success and went back to the living room–again, without a beverage–to finish watching my damn show.
Halfway through another episode, I realized the part of the instructions I’d failed to follow.
I hadn’t made the frosting.
Making it back to the kitchen in record time, I looked at the ingredients I’d scribbled down, looked in the fridge and realized that cream cheese frosting was just… not going to happen.
Mainly because we had no cream cheese.
However, there was still butter and milk. Powdered sugar. This could be salvaged.
I had made powdered sugar icing for various baked goods before and was reasonably certain of my ability to mix three ingredients together in such a way as to make a frosting substitute for my hard-earned cake.
The powdered sugar had been in the cabinet for quite some time, but it was still good, right? The bag felt solid. Very solid. And without checking to make sure that the top was closed, I squished the contents a couple of times and gave the bag a good, hard shake.
By the time the air cleared, I was covered. The counter was covered. The floor, stove, bowl, milk jug, stove hood and bar were all finely dusted with a thin layer of white.
Dispirited, I dumped the sugar into the bowl, added the butter, whipped until my arm hurt, added milk, gritted my teeth and continued whipping until I had a beautiful powdered sugar icing ready for my Completed Carrot Cake.
I was absurdly proud of the results when I pulled the cake pans out of the oven. Although the tops of the cake sections looked… very brown, I chalked this up to the abundance of spices I had added and left them to cool. I was very precise about the half hour I allotted the cakes to cool. I was NOT about to have my Carrot Cake ruined by impatience.
Half a twitchy hour later, I carefully eased the bottom half of the cake onto a plate. The center looked… a little saggy, but I liberally coated it with the icing I had so proudly made and then clapped the top half of the cake into place.
The centers promptly collapsed inward, leaving me with a Carrot Cake Donut.
Discouraged but not defeated, I poured ALL THE ICING over the top of my Carrot Cake (Donut) and piled the casualties of my baking into the sink to be washed when I could look at the kitchen without screaming in anguish. I poured myself a glass of milk. I got a plate down. I was going to sit down and enjoy my damn cake.
When a butter knife couldn’t get through the Carrot Cake (Donut)’s outer layer adequately, I broke out the big kitchen knife and carved myself a healthy slab. Bearing my prize to the living room, I cued up the next episode, prepared myself with a sip of milk and dug in.
To a carrot.
Specifically, half of a baby carrot that had somehow managed to evade my frenetic chopping.
Prying the evidence of my failure out of my slice of cake (donut), I dropped it in the trash and pretended I had seen nothing. And took my first bite.
Needless to say, the combination of “spices” that had been used in a frantic attempt to cover up the Italian Seasoning did not mix well with the remaining Italian Seasoning. Nor did the lavish drizzling of powdered sugar icing cover up the fact that carrot cake is not supposed to have carrot chunks.
After choking down a few more bites out of sheer spite, I mutely took my plate to the kitchen, scraped the entire failure into the trash and consoled myself with some fucking Oreos.
I will never again bake another carrot cake.
Few stories reliably leave me wheezing with laughter but this one kills me every time I’ve heard it.
Italian seasoning.
As someone who’s brand new to baking from scratch and will get into the angry whirlwind of Being Competent Damnit that only anxiety, depression, and insecurity can bring the lengths you went to to make that fucking carrot cake are probably, no exaggeration, genuinely none, the most relatable thing I’ve ever read.
there’s nothing purer or better than how much kids enjoy being picked up and then hurled at soft surfaces
anyone who’s ever been around kids for ay meaningful amount of time should know exactly how much kids long to be hefted up and then just fuckin tossed! it’s so good! they’re so excited to get fucking tossed around like a sack of potatoes it’s so pure
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