a has been on this kick where she wants me to learn to cook. not like ramen-and-eggs level (i can manage that without supervision). she means actual cooking. from recipes. with ingredients that expire.
the great cooking experiment #
so she left me alone thursday night to go to dinner with her college friends. before she left she was like “there’s pasta sauce in the fridge, just heat it up and boil spaghetti. you literally cannot fuck this up.”
challenge accepted apparently.
what happened was:
- put the pot of water on the stove, fine
- while waiting for it to boil, decided to check my BTC algo’s overnight performance
- got absorbed in a weird slippage pattern on one of my binance fills
- forgot about the pot
- water boiled off
- pot started smoking
- smoke alarm went off
a came home to every window open, the exhaust fan running, and me standing in the kitchen with a wet towel waving at the smoke detector like an absolute dipshit.
she didn’t say anything for like 10 seconds. just stared at me. then she started laughing so hard she had to sit down on the floor.
“you’re literally a millionaire who can build trading algorithms but you can’t boil water unsupervised”
i mean. she’s not wrong.
the makeup dinner #
she took over and made this insane garlic shrimp pasta thing in like 25 minutes. i sat at the counter and watched because she said if i touched anything in the kitchen she’d change the wifi password and brick my algo servers.
NGL watching her cook is genuinely one of my favorite things. she puts on this 90s R&B playlist and dances around the kitchen and uses way too much garlic on everything. her hair was still done up from going out and she was wearing this sundress and i just sat there thinking how the fuck did i get this lucky.
told her that. she threw a piece of garlic at my head and said “flattery won’t save you from cooking lessons.”
the cooking lesson plan #
she made a deal with me. i have to cook one meal per week. she picks the recipe, buys the ingredients, and supervises. if i successfully cook 10 meals without a fire department visit, she’ll… let’s just say the reward involves the balcony and some shit from her wishlist that we’ve been talking about trying. IYKYK.
pretty solid incentive structure honestly.
first assigned meal: stir fry. she said it’s “basically impossible to mess up.” but she also said that about boiling water so her confidence in my kitchen skills seems unfounded.
dr r thinks it’s cute #
told dr r about the cooking situation during our session friday. she asked what it means to me that a wants to teach me something domestic.
i said probably that she sees a future with us. you don’t teach someone to cook if you’re planning to leave.
dr r did that therapist thing where she nods slowly like i just unlocked some deep truth. then she asked if accepting help in the kitchen is harder than i expected.
fuck. yeah it is. i like being good at things. i’m good at coding, good at trading, good at building servers. being a complete beginner at something as basic as cooking makes me feel like an idiot.
dr r said “interesting that you’d rather almost burn your apartment down than ask for help before it became an emergency.”
i hate when she’s right.
the apartment update #
speaking of the apartment - we’ve been here over 2 years now and it’s feeling more like ours than mine. a rearranged the living room last weekend while i was debugging a redis connection issue. moved the couch to face the windows instead of the TV.
at first i was annoyed because she didn’t ask. then i sat on the couch and watched the sunset over the ocean and was like… okay this is objectively better.
she also put up some photos. one from our trip to joshua tree last fall. one from her parents’ house at christmas. one of us at the beach that her friend took. first time i’ve had actual framed photos in this apartment since my parents died.
used to have photos of them everywhere. packed them all away about 6 months after the accident because looking at them made it hard to breathe. haven’t unpacked them.
a didn’t push me to put up the new ones. just did it quietly one afternoon while i was trading. when i noticed she said “if you don’t like them i’ll take them down.”
i like them.
the sleep situation #
been sleeping better lately. used to wake up at 3am every night with this chest-tightening anxiety thing. dr r said it was hypervigilance - my nervous system stuck in fight-or-flight mode from the grief.
hasn’t happened in almost 3 weeks. a noticed too. she sleeps like a corpse (doesn’t move all night, barely breathes, honestly kind of creepy) so she always knows when i’m restless because i wake her up tossing around.
she said the other morning “you haven’t woken me up in weeks. whatever you and dr r are working on, keep doing it.”
i think it’s a combination of therapy and just… time. and her. having someone next to you who consistently shows up. night after night. doesn’t leave. doesn’t die.
that last part hit me as i typed it. fuck.
weekend plans #
she wants to go to the farmers market tomorrow. i’ll go because she likes it and because the tamale lady is there and tamales are the one food i don’t need cooking lessons for (you just eat them, no preparation required, my kind of cuisine).
might try to convince her to hit the beach after. water’s still cold as fuck in march but she looks incredible in a bikini and the sun’s been out all week.
-AK