L’ecole de la cuisine
Almost through Kathleen Flinn’s ‘The Sharper your knife, the less you cry’, a memoir of a thirty-something woman’s stint at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. Kathleen decided to say adieu to her stressful corporate job and bonjour to attending world-renowned cooking school, Le Cordon Bleu, to fulfill a lifelong dream. Tucked between her accounts are recipes of French cuisine, which she makes sound so easy. Reading before bed, I hoped to have dreams infused with delicate pastries and aromatic soups and exotic dishes. Nope, I dreamt about tater tots, bastard child of the French fry.
I’d love nothing more than to go to cooking school. I can hold my own in a kitchen, but there’s always something new to learn about cooking. And I’d love to go to cooking school in France and actually put my French minor to some slice of use. I’d never been one to beg, but if I put up a PayPal on my blog, would anyone be interested in donating to the Send Jamie to Cooking School Fund? Think of the difference you’d be making in the lives of cubicle drones everywhere. If I can crawl my way out of gray paneling and into a vibrant career track, then anyone can!
Repeat after me, repeat after me
Dear Dating Gods
I don’t know what I did to deserve this kind of dating life, non-existent, but I’ll do anything to make it right. Let me now take this moment to confess my dating sins.
Firstly, I’d like to apologize for Mr. Hare for not returning your calls after our first date. But really, it was for your own good as I could not imagine spending the rest of my life being called Jamie Hare and resenting you for it.
Secondly, to Will whose friends I found more attractive and tried to make out with them. Must get a new prescription for my beer goggles.
Thirdly, to Mike aka “Shortstack”. I’m sorry for not returning your emails. I just felt we didn’t see eye to eye with each, even with the booster seat you requested at dinner.
So there it is. The list of all the guys I’ve offended. (And I’m sorry to all the guys I’ve not offended. Trying to cover all my bases). I’m sure they’ve long forgotten about me by now, but I pray, dear dating gods, that my dating sins will be forgiven and I’ll be blessed with a new relationship, one with a grown up with grown up goals living in a grown up apartment. Forever and ever. Amen.
365 days, 1 misguided blogger’s mission
Just watched ‘Julie and Julia’ with my friend Kim the other night at an advanced screening of the most salivating movie I’ve seen lately. Julie Powell, bored cubicle drone, gets inspired to race through Julia Child’s ‘Mastering the Art of French Cooking’ in a year and blog about it. Not only does she reach her goal, gaining friends and inches to her waistline in the process, she gets famous for it. She gets featured in newspapers, she lands a book deal and later a movie starring Meryll Streep as her icon, Julia Child. I would love some sliver of her fame. I just don’t know how to go about it.
I have a blog. (Thank you dear readers for staying tuned to each entry, especially you, Mom). What I do not have, however, is a copy of any cookbooks and no inclination to subject baking in my tiny oven that looks more like a cousin to an EasyBakeOven than anything. I have the time (a lot of time now that I’m no longer taking a defibrilator to a dead-end relationship) though no clue as to what I should do every day for 365 days. I don’t have a significant other-yet, so I can’t write about having sex every day of the year like Charla Muller in her ’365 Nights: A Memoir of Intimacy’, though who would want to with such good TV shows on every night? I don’t have the complete unabridged version of any encyclopedias so I can’t do what A.J. Jacobs did in ‘The Know-it All’. I’m afraid I would lose friends if I tantalized them with random facts and talked more like a Trivial Pursuit game than an actual human being.
I just have to find my niche. I know how to read. I’m pretty good at it, considering I have 44 books under my belt already this year, but I don’t think anyone would want to read about me reading for a year. If you want a book review, hit up Amazon. I’m pretty good at not talking, so maybe I could be a mime for a year, but mimes creep me out so by default I would creep myself out.
Maybe I should investigate into something I’m not good at, like dating. As a serial dater, I could go on a date each week for a year and blog about the weirdos I encounter. But that would involve a lot of name changing to protect their identities, or new entries for datingpsycho.com.
It has been suggested to me by my best neighbor (best friend who lives next door) Natalie that I should create the most narcissistic blog, short of marrying someone with the same first and last name, entitled the Jamie/Jamie Project, in which I will only date Jamies (or James, Jims, Jimmys) and blog about it. Are you reading this, Mr. Jamie Deen? How about you, Mr. Jimmy Fallon- I’m sure your wife wouldn’t mind? I’m already ahead of the game since I went to a Homecoming dance with a Jamie back in high school. I remember it being a rather confusing experience whenever anyone shouted our name from the dance floor.
Be very quiet, I’m hunting houses…and boyfriends
I made the mistake of telling my mother that I think my real estate agent is cute. She asked if we talked shop the whole time during the course of our initial house hunting meeting over lunch. I had to lie to my poor mother, just to throw her off the scent, and say that he was engaged. It doesn’t say so on his Facebook page (yes, I looked him up and can report he’s just as cute in 2-D as he is in 3-D) and neither does it say he’s in a relationship, which would explain his availability on weekends to spend finding me shelter. (Must resist the urge to bait him by asking if we could start the house hunting process with a visit to his house, off the clock, where I will “accidentally” trip over his bed. Naked).
House hunting is hard. Practically every day I’m sent a listing of properties in my price range, but some are in neighborhoods I would need the right gang colors to enter. Other neighbhorhoods are so far from civilization a passport is required. Some neighborhoods are quiet and pristine and everything I’m looking for, but to get to these hidden gems, you have to brush up on your Spanish skills.
I know my perfect house is out there, just as I know my perfect boyfriend is out there- to help me pay for my perfect house. I just have to sit quietly in my camouflage and wait.
First Meeting of the Ex-Girlfriends Club
I met my ex-bf’s other ex-gf over the weekend. Over cocktails, we shared war stories of what it was like to date our respective ex-bf, Drew. She had the unfortunate luck of dating him for 4 years. I, on the other hand, was caught in his emotional roller coaster for only 10 months. She promises me that life after getting dumped by Drew gets better.
I’m worried about the next girl who’ll come into his life and get duped, sort of like a public service announcement she should be forewarned. But inevitable heartbreak cannot be averted. I would have loved to have talked to the ex’s ex a year ago so that I would have been saved a lot of grief and heartache, but I wouldn’t have believed her. Some lessons have to be learned the hard way.
My heart goes out to Drew’s next victim. She has no idea what she’s getting involved in. But when things end with him, because they eventually will when dating commitmentphobes, we’ll have a t-shirt waiting for her that reads ”I dated Drew and I all I got was this fucking t-shirt” as well as an application for membership into the Drew’s ex-girlfriends club. There’s a secret handshake too.
Transformers
My prayer for the year of 27 was for it to be a transformative year. Halfway through the year, I made latent New Years-esque promises to myself, lofty ones like enrolling in yoga classes and saving money. I have yet to unfold my yoga mat and I have yet to feed my starving piggy bank.
It’s not looking like it’s going to be a year of change for me. Instead, it seems as if everyone else around me is changing. Best friends are moving halfway across the globe, colleagues are seeking new job opportunities, married friends are making babies. Is it still a transformative year for me if the fixtures in my life suddenly shift?
Be the change you want to see in the world, said Gandhi. Do I really want to see the inside of my apartment on a Saturday night because I’m still hung up on an ex bf who took a nine pound hammer to my heart and smashed it into pieces? Do I really want to see myself at a job where I am not utilizing my degree nor talents? Do I really want to live a life void of passion?
Do I really want to see everyone changing while I remain stationary? I should hope not. Complacency is not a good look for me.
Make me a Match
The most haunting experience I could possibly imagine doesn’t involve masked men with chainsaws or filmy ghosts. No, the scariest thing that I could imagine would be this phenomenon called Growing Up. Growing Up is an inescapable entity, sure to strike fear in the hearts of many. I am one of them. I met with a real estate agent today over lunch, something called a working lunch. He threw around words like ’mortgage’ and ‘appraisal’, while I sat sneaking glances at my GrownUp to YoungAdult dictionary underneath the table, desperate for translation.
He asked me characteristics of what I was looking for in a home, as if he was asking me what I was looking for in a significant other. Ever the renter, I wanted a home I could call my own to punch holes in the wall in the name of decorating and not have to worry about patching them up at lease’s end in vain attempt at getting my security deposit back. I wanted a big backyard for my future dog to romp around in. I wanted central air and shiny appliances, hell at this point I’d take lackluster appliances, anything to keep me out of Kim’s Cleaners and Laundromat for an hour and a half every other weekend . I wanted to live close to work as I’m not a fan of commuting. I wanted a big kitchen so I could host dinner parties. And if it wouldn’t be too much trouble, I’d like central air. Rolling off my wish list for what I wanted my home filled with, I felt like Frances in the movie ‘Under the Tuscan Sun’, except in my case it’d be Under the Charlotte Skyline.
Later in the day my realtor sent me a variety of property listings. And just like well-meaning matchmakers, there were no homes that I absolutely fell in love with. Maybe I need to take a house for a test drive so to speak and spend a few nights in a house, see if I like it enough to invest time and money in it. And after a few nights, if I didn’t like it, I’d just give it the whole standard, ”It’s not you, it’s me” line and move on to another. They say love will happen when you least expect it, I’m hoping it holds true for falling in love with real estate.
Diving back into the dating pool
I’ve decided to start dating again, resisting the urge to move to India to have a family adopt me to only marry me off to a nice young man and live out the rest of my days eating my weight in garlic naan. My mother would miss me terribly if I moved halfway across the world.
I’ve also decided to resist any invitations for blind dates or set ups. The last one didn’t turn out so well. And since blind dates are involved with online dating, because a relationship via e-mails does not a relationship make, I’ve decided against paying $30 a month to pad the pockets of eHarmony and the like. I’m skeptical anyway of these so-called compatibility tests. The last time I took a compatability test, I was matched with my boy crazy roommate freshmen year of college. And that was the longest year of my life, having to seek out somewhere else to lay my head as she entertained overnight guests in our dorm room. She’s married now. But I’m pretty sure she’s still crazy.
So that leaves Fate to deliver me my soulmate. Yes, I believe in soulmates, mythical like unicorns to some, but real to me, especially after my psychic told me I had one (but really if you give anyone $40 they’ll tell you exactly what you want to hear). Unfortunately, the pyschic with the huge TV set in her living room is no longer dispensing fortunes along Monroe Road, to which I say she should have seen it comin’, so I can’t ask her for a specific date as to when he’ll be coming into my life and how.
So what to do if I’m desperately waiting for a soulmate to show yet I don’t sign up for eHarmony or agree to blind dates or reality TV shows? Good question. If I knew the answer to that I wouldn’t be in this pickle now would I? At this point, I’ll take all the help I can get. If you happen to see my soulmate wandering around, direct him my way, will ya? You’ll know it’s him because I believe he bears a striking resemblance to Kirk Cameron. Or at least that what Mrs.Pyschic said.
