C-File #159: On Making it On Your Own

September 30, 2005

Oh my gosh! It's a C-File! Right here! At this moment! Staring back at me from this very word processor! Surprising me with its existence even as I type it! Not minding my extravagant use of exclamation points as commas!

I apologize to my vast and studly readership for not writing anything the past few weeks, but I think I can be forgiven since this has been such a slow month. Seriously, there's been practically nothing to write about. Would you have really been interested in “C-File #159: On That Episode of King of the Hill I Saw Yesterday” or “C-File #159: On Where The Remote Control Went (Maybe You Know?)” or “C-File #159: On My Massive Three-Day Trip Up the Appalachians to Move to Boston, Start Grad School, and Radically Change My Life” or maybe “C-File #159: On How I Feel About Moss (Pleasantly Soft)?” Who wants to hear about any of that boring junk? Not me!

So instead, I'm going to try my best to resolve a much more important question, one which I am sure has been gnawing at your minds like a little zombie chipmunk. That question is, of course, what are Dolly Parton's uncles up to these days? Well, you can all stop stressing about it, because I've found them. It turns out all this time they've been at Dollywood in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee (so named because 19 th century Tennesseans went there to have their pigeons smelted). Dollywood is an awesome little theme park nestled in the “Heart of the Smokies” (just a few miles upriver from the “Prostate of the Smokies”). I know Dolly's been around a while, so it is therefore nothing short of astounding that her uncles are still able to get up on that little stage in Dollywood and perform for us. The show was amusing (if a little goofy), but all I really remember is one of her uncles singing about how he doesn't need no rockin' chair.

Well I need my rockin' chair, and it has yet to arrive. I suppose I could look up on the receipt when the furniture store was supposed to deliver it, but being as smart as I am, I locked that receipt in my office safe and am now too lazy to actually unlock it and get it out. There's no really good reason to have those receipts in the safe, other than that the only things that actually needed to go in the safe were my passport and Social Security card, both of which are routinely categorized as “small.” They don't really fill the space in a safe in a way that says, “You really needed to have bought this safe,” so I figured I would put some other random things in there to kind of flesh it out a bit. And it's that kind of stellar decision making that's going to make my first year on my own a textbook case of successful self reliance!

Although some of the credit must go, obviously, to the dishwasher. My apartment came with one, and I couldn't be happier with it. This is unfortunate because I think it's doing a terrible job, in both of its capacities as dish cleaning device and backwater receptacle for the garbage disposal. I think I got a backwards dishwasher. I can tell because the dishes are, by the standards of an undergraduate male, immaculate (meaning: rinsed and wiped) when they go in , and covered in brown splotches and scratches when they come out . Perhaps my landlord installed a dishdirtier by mistake. Fortunately, I learned that the brown splotches can be removed by the deft application of a Brillo™ pad, but this leaves the fork or whatever covered in purply soap bits. Therefore, to get clean again, it must obviously go back in the dishwasher. And the cycle continues. I think my entire set of silverware is still in there.

I mean, come on. This silverware is supposed to be stainless steel. I suppose I missed the fine print on the box that says, “Warning! Not stainless if exposed for any length of time to particularly corrosive substances such as food and/or water.” It's not like I'm loading them in a rock tumbler or letting them soak in 5.0M HCl before I load them or anything. Oh well. Company doesn't even have to know it's rust, I guess. It could be any given brown… substance… Maybe I should just tell them it's rust?

At least I have cooking. The other day, I decided to venture into culinary realms unknown and make something called “Chocolate Cheese Pie.” I found it in a cookbook called “Cooking With Only 5 Ingredients.” They don't make cookbooks more Chris-friendly than that! (Unless you count “Cooking For People Who Could Find a Way to Kill Themselves Making Ramen Noodles.”) Just swap Splenda™ for sugar and boom! Instant low-carb dessert fun! And Splenda™ tastes just as good as sugar does, provided you burned off your taste buds with a live coal at an early age! It didn't even involve baking or anything, so how hard could it be?

As it turns out, only as hard as the cream cheese you buy. I was supposed to get “whipped,” and I got “regular” instead, which is a type evidently used as caulk in some cultures. There were only 3 steps. “Mix cream cheese, sugar, and cocoa in medium mixing bowl” it said. So I dumped everything in a roughly-medium-sized bowl. After a few minutes, I observed that they probably needed to be stirred or swished around or something to really be mixed. So I got a spoon and started swirling it around the bowl, only to discover that the cream cheese mostly just stuck to the spoon, and the powder just sat there, unimpressed. No fear, that's what electric mixers are for, right? The first five seconds resulted in an enormous cloud of brown cocoa-dust flying everywhere, the vast majority of which I somehow managed to inhale. Recovering my breath and getting up off the floor, I observed the results of my mixing efforts – the entire quantity of cream cheese had accumulated on the mixer in a giant ball. I briefly contemplated just sticking the ball in the fridge and eating it off the mixer, but then I thought to pour some water on it. Voila! Creaminess achieved! See? I can handle this.

And if you doubt that I could still become the king of domestic stuff, you should see my repair job on the coffee table. You see, I got one of these neat coffee tables whose top actually lifts off to become like a kitchen table (a kitchen table that would collapse under the weight of a Post-It™ note) while you're at the couch. Isn't that neat? So you might think, it being a kitchen-table-slash-coffee-table, that you should be able to put, oh, say, a single plate on it without scratching it. But this is where you would be proven to be a moron of staggering proportions. After having only had the coffee table for three days, I found that I had somehow managed to scratch the surface some 5 or 6 times. And not just little inconspicuous minor scratches. These were full-size wood canyons into which you could ride donkeys. But not one to be bested by furniture (usually), I bought some nifty little wood markers and wax crayons and, in no time at all, my coffee table has gone from covered in scratches to covered in streaks of color closely approximating the original wood finish, when the lights are off.

See? I am entirely capable of making it on my own, just like the opening credits to the Mary Tyler Moore Show. I'm vacuuming, going to multiple churches, making my bed, recycling, cleaning my bathroom, cutting coupons, and paying bills, and nobody had to nag me! You see, I've grown up. I'm completely self-nagging now. “Don't leave your dirty socks all over the living room floor!” I'm always telling myself, for example. I'm also a fan of “How many times do I have to tell you that moving your backpack to a different spot on the floor is not the same thing as putting your backpack away?” and “Company's coming in 48 hours and your sock drawer is still completely unsorted!” I also like saying my name a little louder and more irritably over and over again, but not answering because I know it's just gonna be another miserable chore.

Everything's gonna be just fine.