I have often said that I wished I could be a head in a jar, not unlike the titular (untitular?) character of Beckett’s The Unnameable. This sentiment arises in part from frustration with my lousy excuse for a body. I’m not speaking in cosmetic terms; I don’t find my body actively painful to look at, which is surprising, considering I’m an American woman and therefore expected to spend half my life counting my fat cells. I’m speaking in terms of utility: my body is clumsy, weak, and seems to have been put together by the guy who assembles bikes at Target. Not only is it never able to do anything right, when it’s wrong, it’s wrong in the wrong way.
Take my asthma. Asthma is a disease that turns normal windpipes into vomiting lampreys, as can be seen in the Cleveland County Health Department’s helpful diagram. (For the curious, here is an image of a barbershop sextet of asthmatic tracheas.) Generally, the disorder appears in children, and gradually improves or even disappears when they grow up. My asthma was mild during my childhood; if I avoided cats and smoke (and above all smoking cats), I was fine. Over the past few years, however, instead of improving, it has taken over my life. This may have something to do with the fact that I started dating a cat owner, which, assuming you’re someone whose T-cells aren’t idiots, would be like you starting to date a canister of nuclear waste (not that I’m saying we should inter The Exploited at Yucca Mountain). Naturally, you and your knight in glowing plutonium take all the necessary precautions, but there’s always that slight chance that something will go wrong.
Because anything bad that can happen to my body will, Catnobyl occurred. The spent fuel rod had already gone to live with her human grandma, but she had managed to contaminate pretty much everything The Exploited owned, so he kept it in the storage room. Everything was fine until he had to dig up the waste to transfer it to a new location, spreading the contamination throughout the entire house. Luckily, we were about to move, so after an indescribably hellish week, I escaped.
Unfortunately, Catnobyl has turned my T-cells into paranoid schizophrenics who think all substances in the known universe are out to get me, so we have to keep the new place scrupulously clean. That means that everything has to be disinfected, preferably not by me, before it can enter the house. We even have to wash boxes of pasta with soap and water, something I doubt even obsessive compulsive Italian chefs do.
Because we were too busy making sure I didn’t die, we didn’t have much time for scrubbing the peanut butter. This meant that I had a very limited supply of ingredients — not to mention utensils — to work with when preparing meals.
Luckily, you don’t need many other ingredients as long as you have the following:
Olive oil, garlic, and salt.
You may have already noticed that they’re pretty much the only ingredients in my recipe for pasta. They’re also the secret to vegetables that don’t remind you of an unhappy childhood:
Well-Adjusted Vegetables
- olive oil, about 2 teaspoons per serving
- garlic, minced, about a teaspoon per serving
- salt to taste
- green beans or snow peas or asparagus or spinach or zucchini or peas or bell peppers or…
- Heat a small amount of oil in a frying pan.
- Stir fry the garlic for a minute or so.
- Add vegetables and stir fry until just tender. For particularly large vegetables, you may need to add a small amount of water and cover the pan for a few minutes first. It’s very, very important not to cook them too long; don’t be like the cooks in my college dorm, who would steam green beans by sticking boiled green beans in a steamer.
- Add salt to taste.
These green beans also contain almonds because they were prepared prior to Catnobyl.
Tags: asthma, cats, garlic, nuclear waste, olive oil, salt, vegetables
