Some time ago, my husband wrote an article about the two-person, at home, chili cook-offs that we had between us. He named me the victor of both cook-offs. Although that was quite generous of him to do so (and it was a little flattering) it didn’t feel like a victory. It wasn’t because my chances of winning were 50-50, or because I cook often and can taste individual flavors, or even that I have an appreciation for cooking and eating.
The wife and I have a good system. She cooks great food and I eat it. I OFFER to help occasionally, but more often than not I am either in the way, stir-obsessive, or inept. Culinary Arts is not my strongpoint since scrambled eggs is the peak of my expertise. So how is a couple to simultaneously spend “quality” time together and get the drudgery of meal-time out of the way? Chili Cook-Off! With each chef making their own pot of chili, we squared our experimental stews against each other in two rounds of good-natured competition.
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I’ve found that, similar to musical instruments and Fighting games, owning books on how to do things doesn’t magically bestow the ability. I’ve put a mild effort towards learning Spanish for a little over a decade now, but easily lost what little I had gained even quicker than the time it took to acquire it. Who knew that work and effort was intrinsic to this process in lieu of schemes and money? Screw you Rosetta Stone and 10-day Spanish!
Let’s say you created and maintain a website. Let’s say you always wanted to make and sell tacky, slightly-offensive t-shirts on that website. Let’s now say you spent about two weeks researching the crap out of the process after two failed attempts, ran around San Antonio looking for specific materials, visited the same stores 3 separate times in light of new information you read, and after a couple hundred dollars worth of ingredients and lumber you finally, SUCCESSFULLY, printed your first shirt (although it shrank in the washer and was drastically off-center.)
I’ve had a fair number of accomplishments in my life. When thinking of them, however, It’s funny that learning to solve those colorfully-gridded cubes is one of the first things that comes to mind in contrast to maybe thinking about my education, my art, things I’ve built, places I’ve seen, trials I’ve endured and so forth. Rubik’s Cubes are simple “childrens’ toys”, a psychological assessment, and a pain in the ass rolled into one. They sell variations of the device that have up to 7 rows and you can even find cubes in the form of 50 cent key-chains at many, many stores. For the standard 3x3x3 six-color cube, there are 43 quintillion (43,252,003,274,489,856,000) possible combinations and how even the math to find this number is calculated is far beyond my means.