Number One Household Hazard

Yesterday I lit a plastic jar of peanut butter on fire. By putting it in the microwave.

I tell you this, because my intention with this blog is to channel your average, albeit rather hapless, university student. You know – the trials and tribulations of semi-adult life – living on your own (at least from September to May), but entirely sustained on bucket-o-wings at Quinn’s Pub and the ingenious discovery that you can wash underwear in the sink when a whole load would just take too much effort. But I’m thinking the peanut butter incident (I just thought it could use a little… softening up) is not your average degree of idiocy. As my mother would say, I’ve outdone myself this time!

No one was hurt, as it was. There was a brief but exhilarating burst of flame (shooting theatrically out of the top of the jar), but it was quickly extricated with the contents still unspreadable. And I knew my fourteen-year-old brother and I were thinking much the same – can we put it in again?

My mother and father worry about me, much the way yours likely worry about you. They probably worry about your diet – when you inhale a cheeseburger faster than the ninth grade boys in the back seat, yet seem to have worrying little familiarity with the protocol for cutting up an onion. Personally, when I learned how to cut up an onion, it was a proud moment – here was one vegetable I finally, at long last, knew what to do with – put it in butter chicken!

Maybe when you insist on your right to a night on the town, yet lose your key at the bar (you thought it was tucked snugly into your bra, which elicits an extended bout of awkward fondling), and end up throwing personal items at your sister’s window to wake her up, a little drunk, at four in the morning.

And they might even feel some concern when you spend much of your time wearing saggy jeans with awkward brown stains on the back pocket (what? I sat on a chocolate muffin!), and no longer see the use in brushing your hair, let alone subjecting it to the typical array of sprays, gels and irons.

The reason I know my mother and father worry about me is because, today in the car, my father looked over and said delicately, “Your mother and I worry about you. You appear to have… no domestic IQ.”

Thankfully, I have at least a few more years of university nailed down. This is as full a strategy as I, and the majority of my friends, can think of for keeping adulthood at bay. While the realities of jobs and tuition and “real” relationships still exist, papers and articles and karaoke nights provide at least a blissful distraction.

I am grateful every single day that I’m in university.