thecounterintuitivekitchen

It is not just in the kitchen that I feel steeped in things that counter what you might expect, intuitively. I live in a place where I can drive down a road and pass a gentleman’s club parking lot that has a bouncy house and a waterslide in it in the middle of the day on a Wednesday. 

This parking lot, which boasts a view of an overpass, a power plant, and the now-empty gravel lot that recently hosted a traveling carnival, was the site of the club’s 20-year anniversary celebration. If someone asked me, “What’s that going to be like?” I would have guessed it would be intense and take place somewhat privately, in the dark. But instead it took place in the heat of the day, with a polka-dotted bouncy house and a tall ladder bringing guests to the top of an orange waterslide. All the brightness and music, and maybe the memory of the recent carnival with some of the same gear, suggested fun, and my kid from the passenger seat of our car asked if we could go there. A few things I am certain about, and one of them is that I say no thank you to a temporary water slide in a strip club parking lot.

Often, I am asked to go places with little explanation, like the other day a child, possibly my child, asked me to go to their bedroom to see something. I got a little nervous on the way because of the face the kid was making, and asked for details, and the kid said something like, oh…. ah, for example, the child might have said, “don’t be irritated, but I have diarrhea, and my room smells like seafood.” So I just turned around and went to fetch a Covid test, because Covid is resurgent in our community and even if I’ve forgotten a lot of the last four years, I know what symptoms are of concern.

So there is avoidant behavior for the sake of self-preservation, and then there is the drive to fix stuff that I am not necessarily qualified to fix. They might not seem like the opposite sides of the same coin, but they feel fused in my psyche, maybe because they are both pretty fraught. With peril. Usually, I try to fix things in high-traffic areas. The bathroom is one such place.

Last year, the bathroom faucet was dripping, so I started by getting a new washer and ended up totally disabling the sink for three days.

I had to get and install a new faucet assembly, which is no big deal, unless you buy the wrong part twice, which I did. And then also decide to get into some deep cleaning and caulking and grouting. Also, if you are unsure about which faucet to get and your hesitancy is a magnet for all the staff at the hardware store to congregate around you, like you have been flushing pheasants, and they talk so much that eventually they are just talking to each other about decks and stuff, you might just grab a faucet and not realize until you are wearing a headlamp at midnight and using kitchen tongs wrapped in rubber bands to manipulate the tiny allen wrench needed to tighten the base of the cold water handle that is about two centimeters from the immovable marble backsplash, that you could have probably gotten a different one. But now it’s midnight on the second day and you want your family to be able to wash their hands and brush their teeth and stop pitying you. In this example, it’s you, not me, as you can see by the second person here. Good job, you! You did it.

I have also obsessed over the state of the ancient-seeming metal baseboard cover, and chosen to sand it in the bathtub and repaint it while crouched on the bathroom floor, as opposed to, say, the roomy workbench in the garage. Recently, I noticed that some wooden molding at the base of the wall near the shower had gotten damp and bulgy, so one morning before work I decided to just pry it off the wall with a rattail comb. Then, clearly, I needed to replace it with something waterproof, so I decided to tile a tiny area. I watched about six Youtube videos and spent too much time looking at various tiles. A mosaic? A custom tile? (We know many ceramicists.) No, I would just buy three tiles and cut two of them to accommodate the weird little L-shaped bit of wall. It looked like my options were to buy either a $300 tile cutter to trim 39 cents’ worth of tiles, or try to DIY it. So I measured, marked, and then used an X-acto knife to score the tiles, thinking I’d try to break them along the score lines. But then I went too deep with the X-acto knife in one area and decided to carve the tiles.

Then I realized I’d stripped the skin off my finger, so I thought I’d try hammering the tile gently. But with a jade face roller instead of a hammer. This went poorly. Several people checked on me and urged me to stop. I did not stop.

Next, I found and bought a hand-held tile cutter for about nine bucks. It almost worked. I used an electric sander to try to even it out. I splurged on 52 cents’ worth of extra tiles. I left a lot of things out in the kitchen. My husband put it all out of sight. A month later, I bought a $30 tile cutter, found all the hidden tile stuff, and managed to break one tile, crack another, and cut a third to the right size. I teed up a murder podcast and got ready to tile, but the whole process took about three minutes, which barely got me past the advertisements. Is the tile situation waterproof? Yes! Is it aesthetically pleasing? It is waterproof! How does it look? Definitely like several tiles, all upright and secured to the wall. Was the grout used sparingly and appropriately? It is waterproof! 

I sort of hate the tiles, because they are just white and boring. At the same time, I do not wish for them to be noticed, and really just want them to protect the sheetrock underneath them. I am concerned that making things not-beautiful is becoming the rule, rather than the exception, in my life. I did make a playlist that you might call beautiful to listen to while trotting around the park. But unless I buy the eight-thousand-and-first pair of headphones to fit the jack on my current phone, I have to use ear pods, which fall out of my enormous ears. I once energetically dove into a lake and my earlobes, which could be pierced about 65 times no problem, tore. Away from my face, where they are supposed to be attached. Any movie where someone is menaced with things crawling in their ears just seems like yesterday’s daymare to me. So ear pods have no chance. I would never buy wireless ones unless I were in the mood to throw $300 in the air every day forever. And I have an entire drawer of earphones that also has a yodeling pickle in it, so when I open the drawer the pickle yodels and no, I haven’t bothered to move it.

Thus, when I want to listen to music while “running” (moving faster than a walk but not like I’m being chased or timed), I use my wired ear pods and tape them to my ears with green painter’s tape. I could cover that situation with my hair, or even an Andre Agassi-style sweatband, or a hat, but instead I just go out into the world with mortifying pragmatism without telling my teenager that that’s what’s up because she would die. The middle schooler also probably wouldn’t like it. Has a shirtless man in acid-washed jeans walked by my house singing out loud and using his belly as a drum? Yes. Is there a guy who walks his pit bull and has shouty personal conversations about his bodily functions? Yes! Does this make me feel free to tape music to my head? Yes! Are there any women who do weird shit in front of my house? I haven’t seen any, so it might be that that is my job now.