Life, Love, and the Pursuit of Dessert

If you ask, I might tell you I have no career goals, and that’s a semi-truth. Everyone is so absorbed by their obsessions with finance and Wall Street and you just can’t get away from it. That’s so not my style. I don’t want a job. Ever. I just want to run away and hide. Now, all I need is a hiding place …

Luckily I have one, sort of. My haven, my sanctuary, is my kitchen. And as much as I’d like it to be, it’s not my (convenient) kitchen here at school but my (seven and a half hour inconvenient) kitchen at home. I love my granite counter tops and propane stove and the wonderful cookware my parents have amassed over their last twenty-six (twenty-seven?) years together. It far surpasses the Ikea (at best) and left over from two occupants ago (at worst) mismatched pots and pans that occupy our cupboards here.

But it’s fine, it’ll do, I’ll make it work. I might make it work a little too well, as there are definitely times when my hours in the kitchen are maybe a little distracting from the homework I should be doing. Like those times at 10 or 11 p.m. when, instead of wasting my perfectly good ten dollars on ordering Insomnia Cookies I decide instead to bake cookies. Even though I am an exceptionally experienced and speedy cookie-baker, it still takes a good hour to an hour and a half to mix, scoop, bake, clean, bake, eat, clean, and eat the cookies. And then of course you have to travel ALLL around the house offering them to everyone else, which inevitably leads to another good half hour of chatting and commiserating over tests and homework and classes and lack of sleep. Basically, I just lost two hours of homework time. And I’m not even a chronic procrastinator. Usually. Except for now.

No worries though, it’s all in the name of the career goals that I apparently don’t have. In reality I just don’t like to admit to them because maybe someone will copy me or try to sabotage me or something. Or I don’t like to recognize them because of a fear of disappointment…

Basically, I like to think I am that girl from Stranger than Fiction. I wish I had such cool tattoos. That’s me, at my Ivy League university, doing what I can to stay focused on my academic life, when really what I like to do is make those experimental whole wheat oatmeal-craisin-chocolate chip cookies (think what you might, they are DELICIOUS) that provide much-needed sustenance for my hockey team, or the impromptu (and actually quite disgusting but addicting at the same time) raw eggless chocolate chip cookie dough for late night study break snacking. (Be extremely careful when making those with oil instead of butter, because it separated on me and we were eating spoonfuls of Canola Oil-drenched chocolate chips. Mmmm…)

Someday, hopefully, it will be my job and my life to do this for other people. Bake, not post on blogs, obviously. Unfortunately I am a product of my society and I know (or I think I know) I have to learn some stuff, work for a while, and make some money before I can pursue my dream of having my own bakery. That’s where the whole job depressive thing comes in. While everyone I know is applying for their summer internships at the Goldman Sachs and the McKinseys and the Bear Stearns of the world, I am pondering whether I should beg for work at the bread bakery or the pastry bakery or maybe go for something a little more adventurous and challenging to my burgeoning culinary talents (so I like to think).

At the risk of doing myself a disservice, I’m trying to be realistic and recognize that I probably won’t own my own bakery, at least anytime soon, and I’ll have to settle down as the soccer mom I know deep down I’ll end up being. I have in fact been planning my privileged suburbanite’s kitchen for several years. At least I’ll force my experiments down the throats of my children. And I always know my dad is good for a few slices of mangled chocolate cake.