Ode to Toast

Just shy of a month since we rolled into Rochester, our poor, packed Prius carried everything she could across the continent, leaving everything else (everyone else) behind. What have I missed most? Good question.

My toaster.

Excuse me, toaster oven.

I’ve really missed my toaster oven. You see, I’ve never been a fan of microwaves. Some people say the radiation is dangerous and that’s cool. To me, it just makes everything taste rubbery and cheap. Microwaves are convenient; I get that, but convenient at what price? Rubbery everything?

Plus, it seems obvious microwaves are constructed and mass-produced for the weak. You would never see, for instance, a ninja using a microwave.

A plain toaster is fine for bread, bagels, and english muffins, but there’s no other options. What if I want to reheat my pizza? What if I want to create my own delicious cheesy bread with pasta?

Sure. I could use the oven. This is where you chime in: “Kevin,  you don’t care for microwaves, yet you’re too impatient for ovens.”

First of all, you are rude.

Second of all, you are correct.

The toaster oven isn’t just a convenience, it’s the greatest achievement of the twentieth century. My proof? Let’s talk toast.

A toaster oven let’s you see the bread toasting! You can flip the bread if one side is too dark and the other not so much. You can toast your bread with a chunk of butter on top (and watch it deliciously melt in to every crevice of grain and gluten). Best yet, the stressful action of grabbing a butter-knife to free a trapped piece of bread has become obsolete. I mean, you COULD stick a knife in a toaster-oven if you wanted to. Your call.

Estate of Mind

It’s been a month since I’ve had toast, you understand? I’ve been quite terrible. Megan and I are short on cash (and not as heavy on credit as we used to be) so every purchase requires frugality and great purpose.

I ask you this: what greater purpose is there than toast?

Don’t worry. The issue has been solved. Estate sales, my old friend, has relieved the suffering.

We’ve been hitting estate sales like they’re dropping dead. My first stop—every time I enter a specter’s house—is the kitchen. There’s rules though, like in Zombieland, to buying a toaster oven from a dead person’s house. You can’t just buy the first one you see.

1. Never pay more than $5 for a used dead-person’s toaster oven. You can find new ones for $20.

2. There’s a difference between dirty and decrepit. It’s not CAN you clean it, but rather, do you WANT to even touch it?

3. Test it on the spot!

4. If the house shakes as you start to walk away with the toaster oven, pay quickly and run out.

The toaster oven I found passed all four purchasing rules, so I’m golden. This morning I thoroughly cleaned it, cleaned it one more time, and then prayed for God to remove any lingering entities.

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Love

It’s amazing what we take for granted. I love you toast; I’ll never leave you again.

The “Suspended Early-Twenties” Vortex

This Fall semester, I am reentering college as an old man. Twenty-six now, I’ll be twenty-seven in November. I’ve reached a conclusion regarding my age—as flippant as it might sound, I urge you to accept my sincerity—I’m ancient.

The past few days I’ve been attending Orientation Week at the University of Rochester, and it’s been great. I’ve been floored by the level of genuineness the school shows towards its students. I’ve spoken with alumni and veteran students, and it seems U of R never lets up. The university is with you the entire way, offering help and encouragement as you progress.

But yeah, I’m older. Being surrounded by Freshmen doesn’t seem to help.

As a transfer (Junior standing), I should be a little older; I get that; I do. But even the transfers are young. Yesterday morning I attended “Breakfast with the President and the Deans,” a transfer-only event (no lousy freshmen).

Sitting with my fellow-transfer students, I quickly grasped two things:

1. The average age of the table, excluding myself, was twenty-one.

2. At twenty-six, I might as well have been in my fifties. I just don’t relate like I used to.

Vortex

My wife says I’m suspended in an “Early-Twenties” Vortex. She’s creative like that.

Basically, the last few years I’ve been surrounded by folks in their early twenties: my friends, my band-mates, my co-workers. When you’re twenty-four and twenty-five, twenty-year-olds don’t bother you. You still relate.

At (almost) twenty-seven, I feel myself growing cold to the trivial discussions of “this is my first time away from home, and I need attention.” I could care less about your many trips to the bar. You got drunk, good for you.

Beer is still new and exciting for most young twenty-somethings. Personally, I’m tired of discussing the subtle differences of Keystone and Budweiser; it’s just not my thing. I realize “I drink one with dinner” is not the hippest sentence to utter, but luckily getting older relieves the stress of being hip.

There’s other differences. I’m married, so I’m not trying to get laid.

At twenty-one, getting laid wasn’t just an idea, it was a life goal; I based every decision around it: when I went outside, what I ate, why I got out of bed… I see it now in younger kids like a stamp on their foreheads; was I that obvious?

It’s cool, I guess. College is about getting laid for a lot of people. It’s about exploring and experimenting. It’s about being away from home for the first time and making bad decisions.

What if you’ve already done all that? What if you’ve already found yourself?

I desire to make a difference in the world. I’m ready to meet intellectual people and discuss meaningful topics. Cheesy as it sounds, I’m ready to make the most of my education.

Too-Cool for School

As I read over what I’ve written here, I see how asshole it all sounds. I’m too cool for twenty-year-olds.

That’s not it at all.

I had an amazing conversation with two twenty-year-olds on the first day of orientation. They were both amazing, incredibly smart people (smarter than I was at twenty) who deeply inspired me. It’s not the age I wish to distance myself from, but a state of mind.

Maybe I’m in some late-twenties life-crisis.

I once again find myself without a clear conclusion. Like a case of The X-files, I’m so close to capturing the truth but can’t quite take it home.

So goes life.

At least I can see the forehead stamp and laugh a little bit. Maybe Solomon was wrong; wisdom starts not at the fear of the Lord, but when we learn to laugh at ourselves and our pasts.

Wish me luck as I go forward.

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Memoirs of a Music Fanatic

We saw mewithoutYou last night. They’ve been a favorite band of mine for eight years now (geez). My fifth time seeing them and probably my last considering the average lifespan of indie-bands, I was reminded, during the show, of a time when life was simpler, when good music was the priority and everything else was dreck.

mewithoutMe

It started in high school. My afternoons were spent visiting record shops and my weekends spent seeing concerts. It wasn’t just about consumption; no, the music-life was about discovery. I was a California 49er searching for gold—staying hip and ahead of the curve—perusing the used and new-release bins for the unknowns and the yet-to-be-discovereds, old-favorites and new.

When a good group traveled through town I’d buy tickets and request time-off in a second-natured trance. The live-show, you see, completed it all.

What I realized last night, while watching the opening acts (in a dark smelly club I’ve never been to before, and yet, have been to so many times), was that almost all of my favorite groups from the last ten years have gone away. They’ve just left. Soon, I’m sure mewithoutYou will sail into the fog too.

I’ve noticed it before. I mean, I get it. Groups come and go; not everyone’s favorite band gets to be The Rolling Stones.

But what strikes me is the perspectival meaninglessness. Does it all just boil down to a ticket stub in a scrap book, a CD case on the shelf? Is that good enough? I used to pretend it meant something more, the music, the experience, but now, when another favorite band bites the dust, I’m surprised at how little it affects me.

The lead singers, the drummers, the guitar players I foolishly idolized—I’m curious if these days they wonder about me more than I do them.

Diskney 

On the second shelf of my bookcase, here in Rochester, lies two stacks of CDs. There’s maybe thirty albums total, “Quintessential,” I guess. If a fire burned my building tomorrow and I lost them all, I’d be sad, but I’d move on. Sometimes, I wonder if holding on to them keeps me from moving forward.

When we were preparing to move across country, we sold and gave away just about everything that wouldn’t fit in the car. Included was a box of maybe a hundred CDs, a box I had been meaning to donate to the local public radio station but never could.

Finally the day came to move, and they had to go, so I dropped them off. I wanted the moment to be something bigger than it was, a Toy Story 3-esq ending where a young, inexperienced music lover discovers my box of give-aways, presses play and falls in love. With courage, I’d drive away and wave, “Goodbye, pals.”

But that didn’t happen. Instead, a grubby, uninterested hipster threw them in the corner and probably the trash after I left: “You want a receipt?”

Getting older is weird.

mewithoutMe Part 2

Thoughts of meta-meaninglessness and perspective aging filled my brain between every set and song last night, more distracting than a young couple making-out in the front row. Finally, mewithoutYou came on stage and tore into “The Dryness and the Rain,” one of my favorites. At this point the crowd moved, and so was I, remembering—if only for a moment—the key to it all. Music doesn’t need to make sense. It just needs to have feeling.

Maybe that’s a good enough reason for spending a life chasing it.

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“The fish swims in the sea, while the sea is in a certain sense, contained within the fish! Oh, what am I to think of the writing of a thousand lifetimes could not explain if all the forest trees were pens and all the oceans ink?” –mewithoutYou

Rochester Day 12: Rabies Scare

The only thing worse than waking up with a bat in your bedroom is the later, unwavering tension of possible rabies contraction. You know what I mean?

It was five in the morning, and I awoke to the sound of mouse-like pitter-patter and whimpering. In a daze, I grabbed my phone for the flashlight-app and shined it towards the noise. I saw face, teeth, and wings.

Dear Lord, not… I repeat, NOT a mouse.

We’ve been sleeping on an air mattress; yes, terrible for back-support, but great if you need to get your wife out of bed in a hurry; just do a quick bounce-push-1-2 and she’s gone.

The very second—and I mean second—I saw those evil, beady little eyes, and its encroaching, ominous, expanding-devil-wingspan, I bounced and pushed. Megan was off the bed on the floor, waking up—mid flight—to the sound of me yelling “RUNNNN!”

Wide-awake, Megan pulled a Jackie Chan, getting to her feet in lightning speed. We ran out of the room, both completely bewildered, and slammed the door behind us. Expecting claws to shoot through the frame like Jack’s axe in The Shining, I stared at the door in nauseated anticipation.

“What? What was it?” Megan asked, breathing heavy and terrified.

Swallowing, trying to remember basic speech and language patterns, fighting off the fog of little sleep and sheer panic, I found a word that finally made sense: “… Bat.”

Bat Crazy

The creature was after us. That’s for certain.

You could argue the bat flew into our apartment on accident, I guess. The kitchen window was left open after cooking dinner, and the kitchen window, you see, is the only window without a screen. Out for blood though, makes more sense.

Thirty minutes passed and we remained in the living room—frightened, laughing, pacing. We soon realized two things:

  1. We had no internet, and our phones were left behind in the bat-cave.
  2. Leaving our bed as we did, in a hurry in the middle of the night, meant we weren’t wearing nearly enough clothes to go outside or seek any assistance.

I’d love to tell you that I was the hero in this situation, the man. I really would. But my hand on the door-handle, hand off the door-handle masculinity got us no where; Megan beat the stereotype and went in first, snagging a pair of pants and her phone. Best yet, she escaped the man-eating death-clutch of the rabid, Hell-flying mouse and made it back in one piece. (more…)

Niagara Falls and the Speaking, Nasty Universe Pt. 2

When we last left our heroes, Kevin was cussing in a stranger’s driveway and angrily kicking rocks; Megan was hiding, due to embarrassment, from inside of their broken car.

(For part one, click here).

TOWtaly

About six hours we waited. Time slowed down, it seemed. We listened to podcasts; we took walks and explored the street; I peed in the bushes. There was one bright spot when a local, older couple offered us both Pepsi. They left though, and soon we were back in the car, having to pee again.

When 5pm struck, we knew the same-day-Toyota-service-possibility went out the window, so we called around for rental vehicles and prayed for a way home.

Enterprise had one left, an SUV, of course, for $108 a day. There was another place in town, a local shop. They charged only $35 a day with three cars left. The caveat? Well, they closed at 5:30pm.

The last we heard, the tow was coming at 5:09pm.

TOWnality

After six hours of sitting in a black car on a hot day—hating and focusing on everything that went wrong and everybody, including ourselves, who let us down—5:15pm struck, and all of a sudden two tow-trucks slowed down and parked next to our broken Prius.

Two tow-trucks at the same time—it was amazing, like something out of the books. Our luck, if even for a second, was finally turning around.

The first guy approached with a look of horror. He was the one we first talked to, who said we could make it to Toyota if we tried. His name was Dan.

“I am SO sorry,” said Dan, “I didn’t know you guys were still here! Your call was cancelled twice; I thought someone gotcha!” His thick Upstate accent broke a smile on my face for the first time in hours. (more…)

Niagara Falls and the Speaking, Nasty Universe Pt. 1

I’m not sure if there is such a thing as a “Speaking universe,” one that tells you to stay in bed and avoid the day. Maybe it’s a cough and a dry throat at the start. Or maybe it’s an audiobook that won’t finish downloading.

Whatever or wherever “Signs” come from, well, this last Wednesday morning I ignored them all.

The plan was Niagara Falls. Megan and I would pack a lunch, hop in the car, and drive for an hour and a half to the State Park. Since we moved to Rochester, Niagara has been on our radar—mine especially, incessantly nagging at my curiosity to come visit.

“Stay in bed!” said the Universe. Instead, I threw a liquified shot of Emergen-C powder into my dry throat and headed out the door.

Highway 490, Revisited

About 30 minutes outside of Rochester we heard a funny noise below our car. It was just for a second. Like a… well… as if something fell out. But the car was handling great, and there were no warning signs. So we kept driving.

Five minutes later, that warning sign showed up. If any of you readers drive a Prius, then you’re aware of just how scary the big red exclamation point is. We took the first exit we could (paid a toll) and stopped at the nearest gas station for a gander.

We landed in a town called Batavia, and it was there that we learned we had a major oil leak. I knew this because I bought a fresh quart, emptied it into my car, to which my car—as if in protest—urinated it back onto the gas-station concrete.

Roadside ASSistance

Instead of an in-depth analysis, here’s a quick play-by-play of everything that went wrong soon after.

  1. After calling Allstate Roadside, the tow truck guy called me and said we were “Right around the corner,” from the Toyota dealer and that we could make it if we tried, and we’d save an hour.
  2. I disregarded my wife’s advice to wait, and had her plug in the Toyota dealership address into our GPS. Under five-minutes away.
  3. Megan accidentally chose South Main instead of West Main on the GPS.
  4. Five minutes later, we ended up on a country road, surrounded by large fields and spread-out houses. This was where our car finally jilted us to the side of the road and drove us no more.

(more…)