I’ve been thinking about food more often than usual lately, probably since I’ve been spending a lot of time in the cafeteria the last few weeks. It may be senior year phenomenon, because I’ve noticed many of my senior friends doing the same thing. Perhaps it’s because we’ve discovered that sitting in the cafeteria for hours at a time is far easier than doing almost anything else, except maybe for lying down in the cafeteria. In fact, if you’re reading this column in the cafeteria, stop and look around, I’m probably here somewhere. Please don’t wave, because I probably won’t like that.
The cafeteria is a great place to be to feel productive without actually being productive. I’m drinking juice, you can think. I’m hydrating my body. Now I’m getting up to get more juice. I’m exercising. Now I’m elbowing people out of the way to get to the wing bar, which is also exercise. Man, remember exercise?
College has definitely put a strain on my relationship with my body. I alternate between treating it like a temple and treating it like a gas station bathroom. It never knows what to expect from me anymore; one day I’ll eat vegetables at every meal and drink eight glasses of water, and the next day I’ll eat an entire avocado in one sitting, wash it down with peanut butter cookies and jug wine and call it dinner.
Last week I woke up at five in the morning and was so thirsty that I almost drank applesauce. It was either that or warm Bud Light (which had most likely already contributed in part to my great thirst). At least I’ve gotten better at eating less junk food. If you are what you eat, then freshman year I was the vending machine in the campus center.
I tend to become obsessed with certain foods the way normal people have crushes; this week it’s avocados. Ooh, they’re so good. I was slightly ashamed the other day when my friend used my computer and discovered that I’d been to Avocado.org, even though I was only there for the articles. Actually I’m rather proud of my avocado obsession, because at least they’re relatively good for you (or so say the good people at Avocado.org. They’re high in fat, but it’s ‘good’ fat. I don’t really care what that means.)
I usually just get crushes on bad foods, the ones with no nutritional value that attract you with bright wrappers that say ‘Now Even More Great Chocolatey Taste’ (can there ever be enough great chocolatey taste?). These foods make you fall for them and then treat you badly, only to leave you for your best friend and get her pregnant. Don’t tell me that hasn’t happened to you.
When I first moved to Boston, I made the exquisitely poor decision of including my experience as a founding member of the Bard College Cheerleading Squad on my resume. I then spent six months sitting on the couch and wondering why potential employers weren’t knocking down my door (or looking me in the eye during the few interviews I actually got). When you are past the age of fourteen, including cheerleading on your resume (even if it was funny, see, because my college was so not a cheerleading-type college, haha) is the equivalent of shooting yourself in the foot…and then having your other foot wrest the gun away from you and shoot you in the face. It means I spent a winter eating Ramen, sleeping in a hooded sweatshirt under four blankets to keep down heating costs, and considering toothpaste a vanity purchase. All this, so that potential employers could be aware that in college, I had a sense of irony and owned pompoms. Possibly that resume was an accurate depiction of my character, but accuracy doesn’t pay the rent or keep you in toothpaste.
When I applied for my current job, I think leaving the skill of ‘decision-making’ off of my resume (among other edits) was a good decision. Probably one of the better decisions I have made. Really, I excel at making decisions; it’s just they’re usually bad. Although if I make them quickly, shouldn’t I at least get points for speed? Accuracy is overrated. (I should probably not have listed that as a bullet-point on my resume either, but by the time I realized that, I had already gotten it all printed out, so it was too late. If need be, I figure I can always white it out, and in doing so, showcase my liquid paper skillz—and add to each copy a unique, personal touch).
Certainly there are those who make decisions which seem good at the time, but which are eventually proven to have been mistakes. That is not really what I struggle with. My problem lies in the fact that many of the choices I make do not look good at the time, before the time, after the time, at the time but on drugs, or at the time but from a different dimension. They are impossible to defend. No lawyer would take their case. They don’t even deserve plea-bargains.
I flew to Minneapolis for a week recently, and I brought my laptop so that I would have internet access in my hotel room. This laptop was huge and heavy; an ancient piece of equipment I inherited as a second or third degree hand-me-down. I say ‘was’, because said laptop is no longer with us, and it is due in part (or in full) to the latest in a series of life episodes I have entitled, ‘Seriously, What Were You Thinking?’ On the flight there, I carried the laptop in my carry-on backpack, but, shamed by the guard who had examined it at security with his nose wrinkled as though it were a dead mackerel or my tennis shoes, I decided to pack it in the suitcase I was checking for the flight back.
Of course, when we were reunited at Logan airport, it was done for. Little laptop, you didn’t deserve that. You may have been a bit archaic, a tad behind the times. Your spell-check program may have dated itself by asking, “You wrote ‘Old’. May we suggest ‘Olde’?” So what if Goody Paperclip the Office Assistant was burned at the stake by the rest of Microsoft Office under suspicion of being a practicing Witch? I didn’t miss him all that much. The keyboard’s having ‘F’ key and not an ‘S’ key was a little tirefome at firft, but I got ufed to it, and even became rather fond of it.
Another problem with having a history of bad decision-making is that word tends to spread. I offer a coworker my arm to cross a busy intersection and nearly get us both run over one little time, and suddenly word spreads throughout the office that I’m ‘unreliable’. I ask directions from a stranger on a front porch only to realize it’s a stuffed scarecrow posed in a chair, and suddenly I’m ‘in need of psychological evaluation’ and ‘a ditz’. It seems a little unfair to me.
At least, if nothing else, I am learning from my poor choices. Particularly I am learning to hide them and pretend they never occured. At least, now that I have written this column, I’ve realized that probably that’s what I should have done here. So, you can go ahead and forget everything I just said, if you don’t mind. Especially that thing about asking directions from a scarecrow. That totally never happened.
For me, watching televised sports is a lot like reading fictionalized first-person historical narratives. I’m enthusiastic at first, but after ten minutes I completely lose interest. “Hey,” I’ll think, examining a dusty book. “This is a chance to learn what it might have been like for a Minister’s wife in the time of the Puritans. What a great read this will be.” Or, “Wow, the first game of the World Series is tonight? Of course I’ll check that out. The whole world’s going to be watching.” But no matter what happens in the first ten pages or during the first two innings, my excitement inevitably dwindles and, eventually, I wander off to make a sandwich and browse internet personals in search of creepy, socially incompetent people with bad pictures that will make me feel better about myself.
True, the whole, “my good intentions are larger than my attention-span” thing is more frequently a problem when it comes to watching sports. I’ve irritated my share of friends by noisily picking all the peanuts out of the Chex Mix, tooting on my half-empty Corona bottle and attempting to make chatty, unrelated conversation without waiting for commercial breaks during heated sports events. It’s certainly harder to bother anyone else by dropping a fictionalized first-person historical novel on the floor as you trudge over to the TV for blissful delivery from the pain of conscious thought. But I’m sure it can still be done.
The idea of getting really involved in watching sports is incredibly appealing to me in theory. But in practice, I find the games themselves to be generally without drama. I reach more emotional highs and lows watching “Saved by the Bell” reruns than ice hockey; I experience feel more urgency when rooting for a particularly slow-moving parent sliding around in a kiddy pool filled with sour cream on “Family Double Dare” than I do watching a baseball player chase a ground ball. And the rules and stats that flash across the screen during games make me both sleepy and anxious.
Watching as pictures of players’ little heads and crabbed, unexplained numbers zoom across the television at random intervals tends to leave me scowling. (This may be due to the fact that, ever since graduating, staring at columns of numbers is something I do right before writing out heart-shrinkingly enormous checks and mailing them to The Student Loan Corporation). Worst of all is that I know I must be missing out. I have to be. How else can these games bring such joy, such pain, and such endless hours of chips-and-salsa-eating entertainment to so many of my loved ones? My inability to appreciate televised sports leaves a void in my soul, a void that can only be filled by VH1 celebrity-worship shows, Lifetime movies starring Antonio Sabato Jr. as an amusement-park owning single dad with a jealous stalker, and commercials where elderly people querulously use contemporary slang, with hilarious results.
Come to think of it, I guess it’s not a very picky void.
My little sister recently remarked that she thought most people had a better idea of what they wanted to do with their lives in the beginning of college than at the end. Of course, this is the same sister who used to tell me that I would die before her because I was three years older. I don’t listen to everything she says, particularly the phrases that begin with the words “Please stop-” or “Can I borrow-.” I think that in this case, though, she might be right.
Rather than narrowing my field of interest, college has introduced me to a number of different disciplines that I have a passing interest in but am too lazy to really pursue very far. I suppose I should be of the mindset that it is never too late to begin studying something completely new and unexpected; think of all the sixty-year old women who take up painting every day. Well anyway, I like thinking about them.
However, at some point I became convinced that if you didn’t begin pursuing something at a very young age, there was no point in taking it up later on in life. Perhaps I got this idea from hearing about adolescent Olympic gymnasts who were doing back flips at age three while everyone else was falling off the balance beam to tinkly piano accompaniment. Maybe it was from hearing about virtuoso musicians who played Carnegie Hall when they turned seven because they’d had violins placed in their tiny webbed hands at sixteen weeks of age.
In any event, this idea of mine is a problem, because most of the things I began studying as a young child led not to Carnegie Hall, but rather to my learning how to eat with a fork and put on pants. Not to demean the skill of putting on pants, I’m sure that at this point I can do it with the best of them. In fact I only wish I had more of an opportunity to demonstrate my aptitude, but Carnegie Hall has not been returning my phone calls.
I’m really not sure what I want to do when I get out of school. I am open to suggestions, but will seriously consider only those that are written in the margins of hundred-dollar bills. I have tried looking to the past to give me ideas for what I might want to do with my life, but that hasn’t been very helpful. The last time I remember having a passionate goal in life was when I was six and wanted to marry Bugs Bunny. It isn’t that I lack direction, it’s that I…ok, so I lack direction.
I’ve always been jealous of those people who, when asked to talk about their careers, say things like, “I’ve always wanted to be a bus driver. Always.” Or, “Ever since I began studying chemistry in highschool, science has been my passion.” Science was my passion after I saw the movie Ghostbusters, but again, only briefly.
I do have passions, they’re just not compatible with paychecks. Ever since I first discovered sleeping late, I’ve known it was something I wanted to devote my life to. The same was true for Tetris, Ramen, and 80’s rock. In some ways, it’s really a shame I’m graduating. College has really allowed me to accomplish many of my goals.
When you get down to brass tacks, Patrick Ewing doesn’t stand a chance of being better than birds.
For one thing, as poetical as you might like to be in describing his graceful and airborne movements on the basketball field, Patrick Ewing can’t even fly. He doesn’t come close to flying, if flying describes a movement in which an object, such as bird or potentially Patrick Ewing if he could fly which he can’t, leaves the ground for a fairly long period of time. Let’s say at least a minute. I have never seen Patrick Ewing leave the ground for that long. I’m not saying I watch him all the time; but I’m sure that if he has I would have heard about it in the news. So, Patrick Ewing loses at flying, and birds win. Sure, you could argue that there are certain birds that can’t fly, like the kiwi and the ostrich. My response to that is, those are only a small fraction of the entire population of birds. Possibly there are small fractions of Patrick Ewing that can fly, like his shoes, particularly if they are thrown upwards with great force.
Then you have the matter of eating. Birdwatching has blossomed into a fine and respectable hobby in the last century. People even put feeders in their backyards and fill them with seeds in order to watch birds eat from the comfort of their homes. If I ever saw Patrick Ewing eating out of my birdfeeder I would immediately draw my blinds in protest. That is not where he belongs.
Now, don’t assume that I was not going to take into account the fact that there are many things that Patrick Ewing can do well, that birds can’t. This is a valid point. Patrick Ewing, from what I understand, is a basketball champion. He has game. And while birds also have game, it is more in the arena of worm location and nest building, neither of which will get you drafted into the NBA. However, while Patrick Ewing can brag about how many high scores he can get in a basketball game, he also has something that birds lack: arms. Birds really don’t have arms– they have wings, but wings serve one purpose only, while arms are useful in many various ways. So of course Patrick Ewing is good at basketball! But why isn’t he good at nest building? You would think, with arms like his, that he would also be a champion nest builder. And yet, you will find, that there is no record of any sort of nest that has ever been created by Patrick Ewing with his arms. This is because he is lazy, and because of that, he is far inferior to birds in every meaningful way. The early Patrick Ewing does not get the worm, because he never bothers to, even though he could easily do so with his arms.
I rest my case.
A recent viewing of the cult classic “Jesus Christ: Vampire Hunter” justified the purchase of several jumbo boxes of Movie Candy, including Milk Duds, Raisinettes, and, of course, the original malted milk balls themselves, Whoppers. I mercifully don’t remember much about the movie, but I do remember glancing at the box of Whoppers and noticing that one full panel was devoted to suggested recipes. That’s right, recipes built around Whoppers. I’ll never claim to have the best desk-job ever, but at that moment I was glad that my list of working responsibilities has never included inventing recipes based on an ingredient that is used as the “O” in its own name on the box.
I tried to imagine the direction I would have gone in. High-brow, with dishes like Whopper-Crusted Salmon? Baked Asparagus with Whopper Apricot Glaze? Given that the recipes were displayed under the heading, “Whoppin’ Recipes”, I decided this was probably not the route that had been taken. In fact, upon closer inspection, two of the three recipes ended with the word Pie. This was not surprising. I should probably be a little more forgiving of the creative spirit of the Whopper box recipe suggestions. After all, my own culinary creativity tends to stem from sheer laziness and an understocked kitchen. Craving midnight Mac & Cheese, but out of milk? Flavored coffee creamer will do in a pinch! So will soy milk, half & half, and, once during the holidays, Eggnog.
In fact, I am a big fan of recipe substitutions. It is much easier to hunt through your cabinets and find some other, similarly-colored ingredient to use than to put on your coat and go around the corner to the store. Thus I once used heavy cream in lieu of buttermilk, and shortly thereafter was told by two people that you can essentially make buttermilk by adding lemon juice– not butter! to milk. But really, who has lemon juice lying around? And forget about milk.
While my earliest childhood forays into the culinary field involved making ‘soup’ out of things that dissolved in water (think mints), the seeds of my real interest in cooking blossomed on a stony path bordered by an EZ Bake Oven. For those of us who never had the privilege, baking with an EZ Bake Oven in the late eighties was baking by lightbulb. I use the term ‘baking’ in the broadest sense possible, because often it was more like ‘warming’, or ‘shining a bright light on’ your tiny confections. Cakes and cookies that sprang fully-formed from the forehead of the EZ Bake Oven were clearly inferior in every way to the real thing, particularly where texture and portion size were concerned, unless you like spending an hour to bake four pale cookies the size of nickels. I don’t blame my mother for holding me off of the real oven for as long as possible, however, especially considering that my recipe repetoire at that point was limited to Tic Tac Soup.
I still remember fondly the time my little sister and I, given the job of making dessert for that evening, worked all day baking cakes the size of decks of cards and batch after four cookie batch. We made signs advertising the event and hung them up around the apartment. The dessert menu we devised that night included sugar cookies and imaginatively titled “Brownie Balls”. One of my signs cleverly alternated between words written in large inch-high letters and words in tiny print. Thus, when read from afar you missed the words ‘cookie’ and ‘brownie’ and the sign announced, “SUGAR AND BALLS FOR DESSERT TONIGHT”. My four year old sister’s sign read, in large shaky letters, “IF YOU LIKK COOKIES, YOU WILL LIKK OUR COOKIES”. My parents still have those signs. It was not until later that I realized our posters were more responsible than our dessert for the amount of choking they did that evening.
Now, I use the grown-up oven! And most of my recipes do not involve adding water to powdered mixes (I said most). My interest in cooking and baking has grown, though my ambition, sadly, has stayed the same size. I have made many of the dishes in my roomate’s Betty Crocker Cookbook, and have had moderate success following several online recipes. But the gauntlet landed at my feet when I purchased my very own copy of Joy of Cooking. Flipping through it in my initial excitement, I found I had trouble identifying and/or pronouncing the names of roughtly 70% of the recipes (Quick Pink Chaud-Froid, I’m looking in your direction).
Joy of Cooking is a cookbook which takes for granted that you have access to as well as a working knowledge of Buckwheat Groats (which I capitalize out of concern that it is the name of a person), and that you may someday need to know how to prepare and cook a bear. It is the only cookbook I ever felt like apologizing to. “Um, Octopus Pasta Sauce sounds really good, Joy of Cooking, but I kind of just wanted to make spinach dip, if you don’t mind.” It is no small thing to go from recipes that show a measuring-cup half filled with light-blue liquid to indicate that you need to add a half-cup of water, with a diagram of a spoon to indicate stirring (thanks, Betty Crocker!), to recipes that begin with the words, “Draw and cut free from the shell 1 armadillo. Discard fat and all but the back meat.”
If you think Twister when you read the word ‘Game’; if you prefer pretty photographs of cakes to chilling line drawings of a hiking boot firmly planted on the head of a squirrel as the squirrel is stripped of its hide, then this may not be the cook book for you. Sometimes I feel that Joy of Cooking would be more accurately titled if the word ‘Joy’ were replaced by the word ‘Fear’ and the words ‘of Cooking’ were replaced by the words ‘of Joy of Cooking’. The first recipe I made from this book was a simple coffeecake, and throughout the ordeal I almost expected Irma S. Rombauer to jump from the pages, rap my knuckles with a wooden spoon and cry, “I said UNSALTED butter, you fool!” Like some sort of mystical Tome of Spirits, to this day every time I open that book I can hear spirits moaning, “You call that braaaaaising?”
Nonetheless, I will keep trying. While I may never churn my own butter, will continue to insist that chocolate chips are an appropriate substitution for nearly every ingredient, and will probably never perfect a Blanquette De Veau (I bet you don’t know what that is either), hopefully I will someday return the investment my parents made in my future by buying me that lightbulb oven.
Tear out your hair, beat your breast, fill your pants with dirt and howl in misery, all those who missed the Pumpkin Carving Contest last week in the multipurpose room. Go ahead, I’ll wait here.
Yes, it was that much fun. My team made a robot pumpkin. I was so excited about it that when we finished, I decided to carve another pumpkin all by myself. It was soon plain to me that I had followed in the footsteps of most artists of questionable talent who attempt solo careers. While the pumpkin I worked on as part of a team came out looking sassy and robotic, my pirate pumpkin, embarked upon in a selfish quest for personal glory, was neither sassy nor robotic, but it did inspire several curious onlookers to question and ultimately discard the idea of the existence of God.
It didn’t look anything like a pirate. I don’t know what it looked like. In any case it was a lopsided, toothless token of my artistic inadequacy. It reminded me of a pumpkin I decorated with a green magic marker when I was four. There is a picture of me, taken that Halloween, with my arms around it, staring into the camera with the direct, pained gaze of a misunderstood artist. My creation had an enormous raggedy maw full of shark teeth, rimmed by two eyes of different sizes, with a nose on his forehead. Examining my latest pumpkin attempt has confirmed my suspicions. Artistically, I peaked at four.
Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, I grew up believing that I was a good artist. Perhaps I had one too many encouraging babysitters or overenthusiastic arts and crafts instructors at camp. As it is, nothing I ever draw looks like what it’s supposed to be. When I was little, I solved this problem by telling my Mom what my scribbled drawings were–there were a lot of cowboys–and having her write it at the bottom. Now that I can read and write, I do that part myself. No matter how much they disagreed with it, few art teachers could disregard the pure efficiency of this method.
I still remember the high school art teacher who broke my gentle, deluded spirit. She is the one to whom all credit is due for my sadly realistic view of my meager artistic talents. She made us paint from still-life arrangements which consisted of mountains of elaborately arranged fruits and vegetables, which, amazingly enough, after four or five months, rotted away. This infuriated her.
She was less than five feet tall and shaped like a mini-fridge, wore long beaded necklaces and made me hate myself from 2:00-4:30 on Mondays and Wednesdays. This was because she made me use color. A student of the doodling-with-a-pen-on-lined-paper-during-math-class school of art, color did not belong in my artistic world. Nor did fruit, or, for that matter, Mrs. Thompson.
After a semester, my canvas was filled with pears that looked like neon light-bulbs and bunches of grapes that looked like they were caught in midexplosion. I told myself that my fruit picture looked inept and distorted because I was working so close to it. Once in awhile I would tack it to the wall and look at it while backing away slowly, hoping that distance would resolve the colorful mess into something that didn’t make you want to stop eating fruit (or perhaps into something that didn’t look like the tragic result of not eating fruit. I don’t know what I meant by that, exactly.) The further away I got, the better I felt, not because the picture looked any better, but simply because I was farther away from it.
Near the end of the year, I came to class to find that my painting had been cut neatly into three pieces and stacked in the corner, to be used by students as scrap paper. I brought them to Mrs. Thompson and demanded an explanation. She looked shocked and apologized, claiming that she had only seen the blank back of my picture, and hadn’t realized that it had a painting on the other side. But a look of understanding passed between us.
The following was written for a “Drunken Edition” of the newspaper I wrote for in college.
I’ve spent more time writing this column than I have my senior
thesis, and I probably shouldn’t find that funny, let alone really funny. I can definitely say that college has taught me how to prioritize, and so can the enormous pile of dirty laundry that is growing up the wall in the corner of my room. It can also tell fortunes.
College has likewise encouraged me to pursue my own interests, like eating six or seven boxes of mac and cheese a month, an activity which has certainly helped me to grow as a person. Lately I have been increasingly tempted to say and do things for no other reason than simply because I think it would be funny. Often, this definition of ‘funny’ also means ‘creepy’ and ‘disturbing to others’. This list of things includes knocking on the door of my neighbor who I have never spoken to and who glares at me when I pass him in the hall, and when he opens the door, peering behind him and saying, “I just wanted to see your room.” I have also considered responding to noisy neighbors by opening my door and screaming down the hall, “No one will ever love you”.
(The author left to freshen up her drink at this point. She returned an hour or two later.)
My God, I hate Tollbooths that have “EZ Pass”. Someday soon EZ Pass is going to take over the world. I shudder every time I drive under that huge, horribly misspelled blinking lighted sign. That sign is the visual equivalent of having someone shove a sock in your face and ask whether it smells like it’s been worn or not, and you know they can tell it has. “EZPass”, the sign says, but what it really means is, Pitiful Driver, Someday You will Bow Before Me and Name Me as Your God. The abridged version just fits better on the sign, especially since they use that slanted lightening-y font to make the letters look like they’re zooming along. With the greatest of EZ.
An EZPass sign generally signifies that the tollbooth beneath it has nobody in it and thus doesn’t recognize money as a form of currency. I ask you, what kind of tollbooth doesn’t accept
MONEY? Can a tollbooth really be a tollbooth if you can’t pass through it by giving it cold hard money? Money is accepted nearly everywhere else in the world, making EZPass’s domain seem rather limited. Waving an EZPass in a store cashier’s face won’t buy you diddley-squat. It may even buy you a night in jail, if you’re naked.
(The column ends here, as at this point its author got up to go play charades.)
In many ways, this last summer was a fairly uneventful one for me. I worked two jobs, one a fun, laid-back retail gig, the other a messy, crazed but also fun-when-the-boss- wasn’t-looking and you could sample the ice cream (as in, “What does vanilla taste like again?…Oh. Right.”) position in foodservice. A “Position in Foodservice” is the phrase you use on your resume to describe the kind of job in which you are denounced by angry tourists, sponge up endless trails of spilt ketchup, and come home each night smelling like french fries and questioning your self worth. In any case, this was a typical summer in all respects except for one: It was the summer of Baby Fever. Baby Mania. Baby Envy. Call it what you will, I had it but good.
I couldn’t tell you why. I have always more or less liked children, although during the last few years of college, it’s been mostly for their novelty. I didn’t see very many of them around Bard’s campus (and I’m sure there’s a good reason for that), so when I did, there was usually a little jolt of surprise as I remember that they exist. It’s a pleasant jolt, but it’s not by any means a jolt of longing. But this last summer, something within me clicked, or snapped, or kicked in, because everywhere I looked, I saw people walking around with their kids and I stretched my hands out feebly, trembling with jealousy. It was amazing, how abruptly the feeling arrived, considering its tenacity. It unnerved me completely. I felt as if, all of a sudden, I was the target of an insidious and diabolical advertising campaign, designed and launched by the most cruel and heartless executive of all, Nature. All around me, mothers cavorted with their babies, as slogans flashed beneath them. “You Got the Right One, Baby”, they said. And, “Enjoy BABY!” and sometimes “Baby: It’s the other Baby meat.” I don’t know how I withstood it.
I also wonder how long this obsession would have kept up under less fortunate circumstances. As it is, I am relieved but slightly sheepish to report that my baby craving vanished entirely once I was in the prolonged company of actual children. My brother Sam and his family came out to visit for a week near the summer’s end, bringing with them Sammy, age 4, and Natalie, who toddled. The kids were sweet and well behaved and said the darndest things; I on the other hand, disappointed myself by falling far short of my goal of being known and recognized far and wide as “The Cool Aunt”. Damn it, I wanted to be the Cool Aunt. Instead I was Aunt Molly, who stealthily polished off the mac-and-cheese at dinner even though she suspected it was for the kids, who probably weren’t too big on lobster salad rolls. So I like both. Is that a crime? Aunt Molly told Sammy that she couldn’t take him down into the cold, dark garage to get some toys one evening because there were bats there. No, they weren’t mean bats. But they probably would be if you woke them up.
Instead of Aunt Mode, I found myself back in the familiar territory known as Big Sister Mode. It is a mode in which you press your advantages. When your sibling is seventeen years younger than you, however, that is really easy to do, and also makes you a bad person. I was never a predatory sort of big sister, mind you. My tyranny never went further than the occasional clumsy manipulation, usually something along the lines of, “Let’s have a race to see who can finish her cookie first. Go! Ok, you win. Hey, look how much cookie I still have. Ha, ha.” Etc. Repeat as necessary until either your sibling’s memory or her motor skills are sufficiently developed to render the game ineffectual or dangerous. In any event, yeah. I discovered that for me, a baby was a bad idea not for the usual reasons, but because I would probably end up competing with it, the consequences of which are too dire to even imagine.
I Heard Tell 