Day 161: I’d Rather Write On The Patio [Friday Thoughts W/ TeeCoZee]

Good Moleman. Bake em away, toys. They are baked. That was fast. It’s Friday, February 26th, Two Zero Twenty One. The weather in Long Island City is 40° & Pantone 289C and somewhere, somebody is pulling a white BMW into a parking lot. A humongous red van is driving noisily. The W train is even louder and more empty. Behind me, a wife is taking a picture. And somebody in a utility van is having a very loud conversation of speakerphone. And me? I’m just sitting on my patio, creepily observing all of the action. I also have some things on my mind.

– Allegedly, we need a zester. With our recent foray into Hello Fresh [which I’ll write about at great length some other time], we’ve discovered that nearly every single recipe requires lemon zest. Is this the secret to cooking that we’ve been missing this whole time? Does our home cooked meals not taste restaurant quality because we didn’t add lemon peels? Probably. I don’t know. I’m not a cook. Or maybe I am. I’m pretty good at zesting a lemon with a cheese grater. That might make me a cook. Who knows. Not me. Who am I? I’m just a cook that zests lemons for a living.

After scrounging IKEA for 20 minutes, I discovered that the Swedes don’t consider lemon zesting to be an integral part of the culinary arts. There were no zesters in sight, just graters and handheld graters with uncomfortable names. Surely, a grater and a zester are the same thing. I don’t think I could ever tell the difference because quite frankly, I could grate an entire lemon and not taste it. I think these at-home culinary companies just want to see us struggle, in both the kitchen and social situations. Somewhere, somebody is preaching the importance of lemon zesting and people are staring at them like they have 3 heads. The whole thing’s a ruse. Lemon zest is a scam!

– If you ever want to see humanity at its most miserable, go to IKEA while their credit card system crashes and stays down for hours.

– If you ever want to laugh at humanity at its most miserable, make sure you bring plenty of cash when you go to IKEA.

– I finally got the car washed. That sounds like an every day occurrence that nobody should be proud of, but let it be known that the whole time I’ve been acquainted with Stanley, I had never seen him be washed. Also, my fear of closed doors also applies to car washes. I watch them from afar but can never figure out how they work. Typically, I would just wash my own car like an adult, but there’s not many place that allow it. The other option I’m used to is the one that you just ride through with the car in neutral. Also not common around these parts. Most car washes are a bastardized combination of the two. Where you have to get out of the car, but then it sits in neutral while it goes through the washer. That takes out all of the fun of an automatic wash!

But what concerned me the most was the thought that somebody could just jump into my vehicle while it was being toweled off and drive away with it. Those fears crept up on me quick as Stanley was just nearly finishing his bath. A sketchy ass dude came up to me and asked me for money. After I told him no, he just kind of stared at me for a good 30 seconds. Just sizing me up, realizing I’m probably too fat to easily take down. He walked away as Stanley started to be toweled off. But then I came to another horrid conclusion: I didn’t put any money in the tip box. And the tip box was just emptied. They would know. I would never be able to go back there. I had to throw something in.

I pulled a couple of singles out of my pocket, but struggled to get them into the box. Of course. One went in and the other fell to the ground. I bent over to pick it up and the dude double-stepped back towards me. Without saying a word, I gave him the dollar, got in the car, sped off and never looked back. This was because the towel guys knocked my mirrors out of whack. I literally couldn’t see what was behind me.

Try this trick over the weekend: make sure you check your mirrors after somebody dries off your car. It’s really hard to adjust them on a bumpy, dark highway.

Have a safe weekend, everyone!

– TeeCoZee