Terminal inefficiency and the long work day of a person who checks e-mail on the quarter hour have conspired to separate me from social activity, my hobbies and the sleep necessary to pursue either. By themselves, these kinds of isolations can be handled.
The more serious problem is that, due to the fact my flat is only conveniently reached from campus by helicopter, my schedule has also forcibly estranged me from my kitchen.
Having never mastered a dish beyond Frosted Flakes during the first two decades of my life, I've begun every year since leaving the dorms with the goal of gaining a modest degree of culinary skill, or failing that, self-sufficiency. Just enough so that I could do something with a bag of flour besides aging it in the back of a cupboard for 12 months.
So far, my only recorded success is throwing out the flour before it started to attract insects.
Since the last several weeks before moving into a new apartment are usually spent foraging for scraps or eating out, by move-in day I've typically forgotten my limits not only as a cook, but also a grocery shopper.
By the time I make it to the supermarket, this casual self-deception has matured into an identity crisis. I'm no longer a domestically challenged student but the personal shopper for a well-heeled foodie, the kind of person who would never eat all the individual ingredients of a salad separately just to avoid washing a dish.
This euphoria lasts for only a few days before I discover that my reach has badly exceeded my grasp. Opening the fridge, I wonder why a stranger has entered our apartment and stocked the crisper with cilantro, scallions and strange, root-like artifacts. By the second week of school, I've become a child of the forest, subsisting on nuts, grains and berries - a hunter-gatherer in my own home. At this point, the only historical record of the brief golden age is a box of whole wheat noodles with an unspecified expiration date that I have interpreted as forever"" and an overly needy rice pilaf that demands 45 minutes of my attention while it simmers.
I could let this dream die, start thawing hotdogs in the sink and spend mornings hunched over a lonely bowl of Count Chocula. Still it survives, in part because my occasionally dangerous unfamiliarity with kitchenware has given me a romanticized notion of it.
I like the idea of all of the different cooking implements available. I admire the frying pan for its versatility, in terms of its cultural identity as much as its practical cooking uses. On any given day I could be sautéing mushrooms and peapods in the wok or I could be frying up some taters on the skillet, if I were capable of either.
The martini shakers and highball glasses on our shelves are a constant reminder of unrealized dinner party ambitions, while the components of at least three different tea sets suggest that my roommates may be hosting a bridge club when I'm out of the house.
Most days of the week I don't make it within 100 yards of the stove, thanks to a complex equation weighing a round trip home, plus cook time, plus guilt-induced dishwashing against the option of eating Mediterranean take-out for the rest of my undergraduate career.
When I do enter the kitchen, I first spend a long moment sizing up my opponents: the panini maker, the rice cooker and the oven. Easily intimidated, I set my sights lower, on the things that can be microwaved, toasted or - best of all - unwrapped.
Frosted Flakes would hit the spot.
For original proofs of the ""Biking + Preparation + Kitchen Fire < Med Café"" formula, e-mail Matt at hunziker@wisc.edu.
