On Choosing a Team

When Cheryl is away on one of her school trips, as she is this weekend, I could just go out to eat, but that's no fun. Better to cook something, hibernate and watch movies.


Light night I started, as usual, with a saute of garlic and olive oil. (The kitchen just doesn't smell right otherwise.) Then I took a big handful of roasted almonds and threw them in my 2-horsepower mega blender with chicken stock, reducing them to liquid, which I poured over the garlic. In the meantime I had a collection of chili peppers (anaheims, poblanos, serranos, habeneros) roasting in the oven. And in a little while I skinned them and chopped up fine and into the pan. After a slow simmer for an hour, I opened a can of crab meat and put some in a bowl and covered with the soup.

So what movie to watch? It's occurred to me, more than once, that I really don't belong to a team (i.e., vampire or werewolf). And so I risk becoming irrelevant in the modern culture, not that Cheryl cares because she's declared herself to be beyond team-choosing in this case and refuses to watch the movie, even though she consumed the books like I consumed my soup last night. No, I finally had to watch the movie by myself.

From what I can tell, my wife and other adolescent females seem to have their own bizarre notions (that I certainly can't imagine), while I can only approach the issue logically and with some practicality, which is to say that we (you and me) are most likely to join a team that reflects our inner qualities, at least as we imagine them, right?

And though I'm not one to make hasty decisions, or to swear allegiance to an unknowable or generalized concept (especially when there is still one movie to go), it does appear that I'm closer to one team than another. With the image of a muscled puppy boy on one hand, and a pensive, glittery ponce on the other, I don't have much choice, do I. But then again, neither did she...

Tonight I'm making pizza.