My Planet: Finding Humor in the Oddest Places (4 page)

I tried to keep calm. I tried to focus on entry No. 18: “Spicy pork rinds cause me to break out in red spots on my face.” I couldn’t recall eating spicy pork rinds, but perhaps I’d ordered a dish that was made with them but failed to state this on the menu. From now on, I’d be sure to ask.
Waiter, is the flan made with spicy pork rinds?

In the end, it was no use. I was up all night, fretting over interstitial lung disease. For a hypochondriac, simply running the name of a new disease through your mind once or twice is enough to convince you that you’ve got it. I frequently remind myself of my stepdaughter Phoebe, who, some years ago, heard someone talking about mad cow disease. The next day when a friend of the family said, “Hi, Phoebe, how are you?” she stated calmly, “I have mad cow disease.” But Phoebe was a child. I am an adult. I should know better. Perhaps there’s something wrong with me.

TV Dinners

I recently came across a TV show called
The Naked Chef
.
You probably all knew this, but the Naked Chef wears clothes. He is no more naked than the Galloping Gourmet was galloping. He’s just a British guy cooking.

“They call it that because he uses simple, fresh ingredients—the food’s not all gussied up,” said my husband, Ed, settling in beside me on the couch.

“Aha.” I picked up the remote.

Ed grabbed my wrist. “What are you doing? Emeril’s coming up.”

Do you recall the look on Mia Farrow’s face when she peers into the cradle at the end of
Rosemary’s Baby?
Picture that on me. I was about to learn that my husband, watcher of sports and wearer of tool belt, has been checking out the Food Network—daily. Ed works at a newspaper, where they’re allowed to have TVs so that they can keep abreast of breaking news, such as Martha Stewart visiting an asparagus farm. Lately, his set has been tuned to the Food Network.

We sat in silence as the Naked Chef made monkfish kebabs. He pronounced the last syllable “babs” not “bobs,” and instead of skewers, he was using rosemary sprigs. Adding to the confusion, our chap insisted on giving ingredients in ounces and pints.

“They translate the amounts for you on the recipe you can print out,” Ed reassured me while at the same time alarming me deeply, for this meant that he had been visiting the Food Network website. He went and got a Naked Chef pizza dough recipe. “One pint” had been helpfully converted to “568 milliliters.” It would be simpler to just move to England.

It took the Naked Chef all of three minutes to ready his kebabs. Here is the seductive deceit of cooking shows. The ingredients have all been washed and diced and set aside in a dozen tiny glass bowls. No one is ever shown tidying up afterward and ruining her manicure washing tiny glass bowls. Ed made an amazing roasted chicken and dumpling soup over the holidays, but because Tyler Florence appeared to make it in 20 minutes, Ed miscalculated, and we ended up eating shortly before midnight. The cleanup brigade is still at it.

I explained this to Ed while the commercials were on. A woman was demonstrating a coffee mug with a built-in blender at the bottom to froth milk so you don’t have to buy a milk steamer, but you have to drink out of a blender.

Ed tried to make the point that the shows aren’t just educational, they’re entertaining. Unfortunately for him, the network was at that moment broadcasting a segment about whipped dessert-topping strategies. A woman was crowning a piece of pie with a “rippled dollop.”

“There is no dark side to this dollop,” said the woman, and you couldn’t argue with her there.

Emeril was on next.
Emeril Live
is one of the Food Network’s most popular shows. It’s based on the daytime talk-show format: a sound stage, an excitable studio audience—even a house band. But in place of witty, attractive celebrities and a funny monologue, you get a middle-aged man cooking.

Today Emeril had taken the camera backstage for a tour of his pantry: “Over here we got the snail dishes, the ramekins, the bread pudding cups.” Ed and I recently videotaped the contents of our home for insurance purposes. The tape features Ed narrating as the camera pans from one closet shelf to the next: “Extra pillows, place mats. This is a sewing machine . . .” I’m thinking we could use this tape to launch our own entertainment network: the Storage Channel.

Setting aside the issue of whether these shows are entertaining, I raised one final point. The irony, the dark side to this dollop, is that with people watching Emeril three times a day, no one’s got time to cook. To prove me wrong, Ed made Food Network crab cakes and broccoli rabe with anchovies. He made them fast, and he made them amazing. I am eating humble pie, only this time I know how to top it in an attractive and professional-looking manner.

Frequent Flierrr#*!

My father-in-law turned 80 this year
, and there was a big party in South Florida. A few months beforehand, I decided to use up some frequent flier miles and go. I called United, because they’ve filed for Chapter 11 and I wanted to get rid of my miles before they get to Chapter 12, which is the chapter where they cut out 70 percent of their routes and start serving Kool-Aid and salami ends.

I gave the frequent flier man the date. There was nothing into Fort Lauderdale, nothing into West Palm Beach. Perhaps it was a blackout date. Frequent Flier Plans, as you know, have more blackout dates than Anna Nicole Smith. It certainly wasn’t a holiday, unless you count Bunsen Burner Day. But this hardly merits a blackout.

Bunsen burners may well get the day off, may well wish to go and visit their relatives, but, tragically, FAA regulations prohibit Bunsen burners on airplanes.

There was a flight into Miami, which I said I’d take. I’ll rent a car, I said. I’ve got lots of those free rental car certificates that the frequent flier programs send you to make you feel better about having to fly into the wrong city on the wrong day. Then again, there’s a reason I have lots of these. I can’t find anyplace that’ll honor one. I’ll walk up to the counter and hand the woman my certificate, and she’ll start shaking her head. “Today is Wednesday,” she’ll say slowly and with fraying patience, as though talking to a small driver’s-license-bearing child. “This coupon is for the third Friday of a month ending in
E
. It says right here it must be used
before
National Foot Health Day yet
after
the start of the Tule Elk rut season. Besides, we have nothing left but locomotives, and this coupon isn’t good for those.”

“Oh, one thing,” said the United Man. “The Miami flight is on the day before you want to leave. Is that okay? And I see it leaves out of San Jose, not San Francisco. Does that work for you?”

“Sure,” I said. “Oh, one thing. My credit card is expired, so I was going to pay you in Betty Crocker coupons. Does that work for you? And I’ll be traveling with a family of Bunsen burners. Is that okay?”

The man from United had an idea. He said that if I cashed in 40,000 miles instead of 25,000 miles, there would be more seats available. This would put me in the No Restrictions Category. Unfortunately, it would also put me in the Gave Up a Free Trip to Hawaii Category.

He found me a flight into Fort Lauderdale, and then he said, “There is one stopover. In Chicago.” Unless you are trying to draw Anna Nicole Smith with your flight pattern, you don’t fly up to Chicago and back down to get to Florida. Clearly we had moved on to Chapter 12. We were right on the brink of Chapter 13, where the CEO sells the company to Air Burundi and you’re out of luck unless you happen to be traveling to Bujumbura, and even then you’re going to have a plane change in Chicago.

“Okay,” I said to the United Man. “Let’s say for the sake of argument that I decide to do this. Let’s say I trade in my free trip to Hawaii for the opportunity to spend 12 hours with my knees inside a stranger’s kidneys, eating embalmed chicken and breathing last year’s air. What does the return look like?”

The return looked like an ad for prescription-strength pain reliever. It was one of the busiest days of the year, the man said. All the flights were overbooked. For the Sunday I planned to return was the last day of Spring Break. Spring Break, as you probably know, is a week-long gathering of American college students, similar in many ways to the Tule Elk rut season.

There were no flights at all out of South Florida. I wouldn’t be going anywhere with my frequent flier miles, except possibly to my therapist, where there would at least be more legroom.

Hold Everything!

We are in the grip of a nationwide container mania.
We have Tupperware and Rubbermaid. There’s Hold Everything and a chain called The Container Store. Soon the earth will need a special caddy to organize its container franchises.

This is creating conflict in our home. We don’t need conflict in our home, as we’ve got nowhere to put it. My husband, Ed, is one of those people made nervous by the thought of throwing things away. There may come a day when he’ll need bank statements from 1979 and adapters for long-extinct electronics goods. (Everyone saves adapters, thinking they will work on other gadgets—that they’re
adaptable
—but this has never happened since the dawn of adapters. Go and throw them away.)

Places like The Container Store only encourage people like Ed. Now they can pretend to be doing something about their clutter. They can put adapters in a special Useless Adapter Bin. They can organize their junk rather than doing the sensible thing and junking it.

Ed came home from The Container Store last week with a Pull-Out Lid Organizer for all our plastic container lids. Why don’t we just get rid of some of our plastic food containers, I said, raining on his parade, as is my wifely wont. At the moment, we’ve got, oh, 345 of them. But according to the Ed system, you can’t throw away perfectly good food. You must put all leftovers in plastic containers until they smell, whereupon you may throw them away, because they’re no longer perfectly good food. So it is that our refrigerator does not contain food, but variously sized petri dishes. There’s waffle batter in there dating back to the dawn of adapters.

Ed relented on the plastic containers, on one condition: I’d agree to come with him to The Container Store. For he knew what I did not: These stores cast a spell on people. Soon I would be just like him. I’d find myself entranced by a Clear Panty Box, thinking,
Yes, I need to see my undergarments at a glance.
I would catch myself eyeing an acrylic Coffee Filter Holder, thinking,
Handy, attractive, only $8.49.
Were I thinking straight, I would realize that I already own a coffee filter holder, because the filters came in a box, and the box was free.

The last time we were there, Ed fell for an in-closet shoe rack—a good idea, except Ed’s shoes rarely make it into a closet. Ed has a near-religious belief in the tidying power of special storage devices. If you buy the rack, the shoes will come.

Half of the first floor of The Container Store is devoted to walk-in closet systems. Thankfully, we have no walk-in closets, so we didn’t have to fight about this. Though some people would argue we do have a walk-in closet, and we’ve chosen to use it as a bedroom. My stepdaughter recently informed us that Mariah Carey’s closet is as big as our house. “So our house is the size of a closet?” I said, sounding hurt.

“No.” She gave me the implied
duh
. “I mean it’s the size of Mariah Carey’s closet.” The conversation went on in this vein for a while.

I told Ed I expected to get up in the morning and find Mariah Carey wandering forlornly through the dining room in her underwear. He raised a brow. “Wake me, will you?”

Getting back to The Container Store, I had gone away to ponder Gravity-Feed Can Racks, and when I returned, I found Ed by the built-in closet organizers, looking wistful. I could tell he aspired to be the owner of this system, the tidy, color-coordinated man with the wife who wears only suits and pumps. “Where are their sneakers?” I said. “Their sweatshirts? Where’s their
stuff?
”

“Besides,” I said, “we can’t afford to be this organized.” One wall of the closet system costs $400. I told Ed I loved him the way he was, with his T-shirts heaped on a chair and his shoes willy-nilly on the rug. I told him I didn’t want the dull man with the well-hung tan suits in The Container Store catalog. That no matter how many boxes of bank statements he kept, my love for him would remain as wide and deep as an ocean, or anyway Mariah Carey’s closet.

Night Light Fight

If my husband, Ed, had his way,
you could pop by our place any given night and see me sitting in bed, struggling to hold my head up under the weight of a night-vision headset. Ed is an early-to-sleep sort of chap, who’ll announce around 8 p.m., “Just going to change into my pj’s and read for a while.” Once he becomes horizontal, however, it’s pretty much over.

This makes it difficult for yours truly, for I really
do
read in bed, including the part where you turn the page and read a second one and then a third one. Ed would like for me to do this in a quiet, motionless, pitch-dark manner. Instead, I do it in a chip-crunching, light-on, getting-in-and-out-of-bed-for-more-chips manner. In the spirit of compromise, I bought Ed earplugs and a black satin sleep mask. “It’s dashing,” I said of the mask. “You look like Antonio Banderas in
Zorro
.” This was a lie. He looked like Arlene Francis in “What’s My Line?”

“Zorro didn’t wear a sleep mask,” countered Ed. “His had eyeholes cut out.”

“It was a special fencer’s sleep mask. Come on,” I said. “That movie is all about sleep. Why do you think he writes
Z
’s everywhere?”

Ed’s argument was that as the awake person,
I
should have to wear the uncomfortable headwear.

We were inching toward the marriage counselor’s couch when in the nick of time, I found a product called Light Wedge: “The only personal reading light that has the ability to save the 50 percent of marriages that end in divorce.” It’s a thin, glowing slice of acrylic that lies on the page, enabling one to read “in the dark without keeping his or her partner awake with an irksome reflection.”