Never Apologize

So this seems as good a time as any to start actually blogging--or at least attempting to. In Creative Nonfiction class, we read excerpts from Julie Powell's Julie/Julia and watched a snippet of an episode of The French Chef. The excerpts gave me comfort in the fact that a young woman could use some side project to hold her life together, even if that means making it fall apart more first. Further, Julia Child's hilarious, yet seemingly stoic, personality inspired me to step into the kitchen. (No, no, this isn't another food blog! Maybe...)

Every time I think I have things under control, I realize how much I don't. I crack under pressure, but I can't let myself fall apart. I am the yolk dropping into a bowl with a plop! with just enough buoyancy to keep from breaking. According to Julia, though, I needn't worry about my breaking yolks--"never apologize." They're omelettes anyways; I mean, that's the solution, right? Break and blend and whisk the yolks until they are no more discernible from each other or their whites. God, I am so alone.

I am twenty years old. Twenty. Two decades old. I can't even drink legally yet, but I keep getting these moments of panic where I start to think my life is over. I've lived it all, though I've barely lived at all, and I can do nothing but push forward through some set of routine to keep my body going.

I woke up one morning and wondered what I should eat for breakfast. I need to use up my eggs before they expire. Oh God, I am twenty years old, and my eggs are on the verge of expiring! I thought that I wanted to do my own thing for a while, but too often I felt this urging to fall in love and finish my life. (Why does love seem like such an ending?) During the past year, I spent a lot of time pretending that we were immortal. My cousin Derek was hospitalized most of 2011 due to complications that began with pneumonia, complicated by his DMD. He had always been the other half of my every "we." I could feel this ticking--like the elephant in the room, only this elephant was snoring while wearing a neon yellow tutu. I'm really good at pushing out whatever I don't want in my life. I turned the snoring elephant into a meditating Buddha in my mind, and I felt like I could hold onto that peace all the way to nirvana. 

Then Derek died. He died, and the prospect of death became real--I could, and would, die too. It was that moment when the ticking became my own. And here I am--trying to pick up the eggshells from the floor (never apologize), while I pretend like my yolks aren't longing to be mixed and blended and, oh God, worse than expiring, cooked. Cooked: entirely brewed into one being with ______. No one. With no one. 

"What are your first thoughts after watching Julia Child?"

"There is no way that those eggs are cooked!" I sassed at my prof's question. I have a tendency of saying ridiculous things to avoid some of the serious class discussions. 

Well, for what it's worth (if anything), I was right. Well, maybe. I've determined that there is a list of factors that I could have messed up:

• The pan wasn't hot enough. On my first try, the eggs weren't sizzly bubbling as Julia showed. Maybe my skillet was too cheap? Though, Julia sure stressed that there was no need to have anything more than a cheap skillet!
• Julia did pour a trickle of water into her eggs, but I didn't; she said it was an option!
• I can't have been shaking the skillet correctly. It splashed and jiggled, and each crest left me flinching back, as if I had a sparkler shooting sporadically in my hand. Nevertheless, the top of the egg remained gooey. 
• Julia said two-three eggs. I used two. Were they too many for the size of my pan?
• Maybe it's just the fact that I can't get the terminology right: pan? skillet? I don't know. Something. Surely Julie Powell didn't pronounce Julia's recipes correctly on day one. 

Maybe I don't need to worry so much about my eggs cooking up. I mean, we get multiple tries, right? We're all broken and risk everything to mix with a potential pair, but sometimes, we flop. Sometimes at the end of the date or the years of dating, all that we can do is lay flat on the plate and give up. If relationships worked out every time, life would be boring because we'd all be paired up with whichever little eggy we happened to be seated next to in our squeaky styrofoam beds. (No, how about cardboard? Let's be eco-friendly here; I try.) Hmm... "Life, friends, is boring!" ...so Berryman seems to think.

I'm glad for second-chances. I'm glad for falling apart and feeling like I'm nearly expired and hoping that someday I'll be cooked up tight in that French burrito of an omelette. Sorry, Julia, but it's no 30-second venture, and it takes more than two trys. Even if I'm not that hungry and I end up only cooking one egg, all swirled up within myself, as long as I've made it, knowing when to break and when to bounce lightly in the bubbling heat of butter, I can admit that Julia wasn't too far off, even if breakfast isn't quite what I thought it would be. 

Never apologize.