The new popcorn maker is just as bad as the old popcorn maker

Both of these popcorn makers suck. (At least the outlet behind them works.)

The new popcorn maker is just as bad as the old popcorn maker. And that's saying something. Because the old popcorn maker was the worst.

I lost custody, as one does, of the original popcorn maker during the separation, which was fine. These things happen. And so I picked up its replacement at a thrift store.

And it sucked.

I've been writing a list of reasons my head for months about why it sucked. Here they are:

1. The on-off switch did not work. Instead, we turned it on and off by plugging it in and unplugging it.
2. It was very loud.
3. It got too hot, too quickly, and popped only about half the kernels. The unpopped kernels hid among the popped ones, occasionally and painfully jarring one's molars. It wasted a lot of popcorn.
4. The plastic thingy on the top to melt the butter was warped and didn’t fit properly into its hole. And it barely held any better anyway.
5. Instead of depositing the popped kernels into the bowl set front of it, the popcorn maker chose instead to spew popcorn all over the kitchen counters and floor, unless you wrapped a tea towel around it and guided the kernels into a bowl the way a midwife might gently guide a baby into the world. (I’ve been watching a lot of Call the Midwife lately.) But then the popper got really hot and burned your hands, which is not at all what newborns do.

That’s a lot of reasons for a small and single-use kitchen appliance to suck. I mean, the thing had only one job to do, and it couldn't do it. So last week I decided enough and got all crazy and wild and bought a new popcorn maker, as in brand-new, from a retail store, and just now Rowan and I tried it out and I am not pleased at all to report that it’s just as bad.

It started off auspiciously enough. The new popper is bright red, and more attractive. “The on switch works,” said Rowan, a hint of awed relief in his voice. He turned it on. “And it’s quieter.”

Now, it’s probably true that we put too many kernels in the new popper. And maybe that’s why it got all jammed up and the popcorn got stuck and compacted and the popper at least had the good sense to abruptly shut off as the kitchen filled with smoke and I had to scrape the blackened kernels out with a knife. Still, maybe that was just a poor start and we would get the hang of things. We tried again, with fewer kernels, and the maker squeezed out some popcorn, but the butter never melted, and when I tried to pop a another round, because that was barely enough popcorn to feed an 11-year-old boy and his mom during an episode of Friday Night Lights, it wouldn’t turn on again because overheating. I checked the instructions — apparently, you're supposed to wait 30 minutes in between popping your quarter cup of corn.

I don't have that kind of time, SUNBEAM.

Plus, decidedly un-fluffy kernels.

Conclusion: The new popcorn maker is also the worst.

There's no hidden message here, no deeper meaning I need to get into here. The old one sucked, and so does the new one, and that is deeply disappointing. I just needed to get that off my chest. The end.

As my mother might have said, this should be my worst problem.

I've got the power

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Here’s a story:

For the past five-plus years, I have used just one of the three electrical outlets at my kitchen counter.

[Where are you going? Come back! I'm talking outlets! It gets better!]

The space was renovated in 2010, a miraculous transformation that was worth every penny and all amounts of upheaval. But somewhere along the line, sometime after the backsplash was finally installed and the job was complete (and now I’m thinking of the line in the enh movie version of Eat, Pray Love where Elizabeth Gilbert’s friend talks about the evolution of adulthood and the stage where “you get your granite countertops”), two of the outlets stopped working. Maybe they never worked. In any case, I think I called in an electrician at one point and he couldn’t figure out the problem. My dad, who has a degree in electrical engineering, bought some fancy gadget to test the currents, and tested them, but to no avail.

And so we put childproof covers on the two nonfunctional outlets and used the remaining functional one for everything else, unplugging the kettle to plug in the toaster, unplugging the toaster to run the blender, unplugging the blender to grind some coffee, and so forth. That particular corner of the kitchen became prime real estate. And I sucked it up, getting used to the limitations of the otherwise wonderful space, living with them until they became normal.

But. If you’ve been reading the (admittedly irregular) posts here of late, you’ll know that I am trying to deal with these kinds of things, to figure out what’s wrong and then fix it or get it fixed (or at least budget to get it fixed at a different time). I’m trying not to live with the status quo when the status quo blatantly isn’t working. That’s true in all areas of my life, but of course home is one of the most tactile and immediate examples — metaphorical, too, this getting-my-house-in-order thing.

I procrastinated on the outlets because there didn’t seem to be a solution to the problem, because I worried that a solution might involve having to tear out the backsplash and I just couldn’t stomach that thought, because I was getting by well enough just with the one set of plugs. But it’s January, and I’m still just high enough from getting the chimney flashing fixed to muster up the gumption to deal with this particular (yes, First World) headache.

And so, a few nights ago, I took a baby step toward the solution: I took the cover off one of the non-working outlets and plugged in my phone charger. Just in case. Just to see. Just to be able to describe the problem to the next electrician.

Reader, it lit up.

And guess what? Guess! The other outlet? The one that I haven’t used in five years? It works too. Just now, I drank a cup of tea made with water boiled in a kettle plugged into that outlet. Earlier today, I ate some toast made in a toaster plugged into that outlet.

For five years, I have literally not used an energy source that — for all I know — was always available to me. And that’s not even a metaphor. Except that it so totally is.

And maybe there’s some loose wire somewhere that will kick out once again, flicker and die and need resuscitation in the form of an electrician rather than magic. And if and when that happens, I will make the call.

But for now, I am reveling in my tea and my toast, and in the message from the universe that I have, that I may always have had,  more power, more energy, at my disposal than I realized. I just needed to plug into it.

Light it up, baby. LIGHT IT UP.

Seeing the light

Winter showed up with, as they say (somewhere), a big can of whoop-ass one evening last week: lots of snow, freezing rain, icy roads, crappy visibility. I looked at the window, and I looked at the forecast, and I thought to myself, I know what this means:

SLEEPOVER!

When the weather is winter shite, and my friend Karen is in town and doesn’t want to (and shouldn’t) face the roads leading back to her idyllic little house in the country, where all her best big and little guys are tucked up safe, she tends to crash here, and this makes me happy.

Sure enough, the text arrived:

And then Karen arrived up a little while later, with takeout Thai and wine and a million little projects, and we settled in for the evening (my little and not-as-little guys tucked up safe at their other house), in the living room, the freezing rain going sideways against the house. And every so often I would look up from our conversation and the projects to the living room ceiling.

The living room ceiling that remained mercifully, miraculously, dry throughout the storm. Sideways rain and all. I kept glancing at the ceiling, noticing the absence of leaking, revelling in that absence. If I could have wrapped myself in my dry, repaired, ceiling like it was a onesie, I would have, nudging its dry, repaired warmth between my toes, sipping a cup of hot cocoa. Maybe with some Bailey’s in it for extra happiness. It was that good. It was so good that I wrote a little status update about it on Facebook:

It garnered a reasonable number of likes, and a few comments, some of which were from people — people I know and like and respect — whose roofs were leaking in the storm.

Reading about them, I felt a twinge of surprise: other people, in other houses — their roofs leak? They, too, wake up to sagging plaster and not-so-mysterious puddles on the floor, feel the despair and supreme annoyance at not having every single thing entirely sewn up and dealt with the way responsible adults are supposed to and if you don’t then something is wrong and certainly shameful? Because the leaky roof is somehow, somewhere, subliminally, the sign of some sort of intellectual and/or moral weakness, certainly at the very least grand irresponsibility?

Yes, yes, I know: lighten up, Goldberg.

But seriously. I hadn’t really realized the extent to which I’d projected all kinds of shame and outsized meaning onto what, on the face of it, was a sort of fairly simple home repair. The kind that ordinary people with houses deal with all the time. (And yes, given the state of world affairs, I am in no small way aware of just how magical and privileged it is to be an "ordinary" person living in an "ordinary" house.) I hadn’t realized the extent to which I’d assumed that everybody else had it all together, all the time. Even with Facebook to tell me otherwise. It wasn’t, clearly, a particularly conscious assumption, or even remotely logical — I mean, there are plumbers and roofers and Home Depot out there for a reason, and the reason can’t be just me. I’m not that fucked up. It was just something I noticed once the weight of the thing was gone.

But it makes me wonder just how many more pounds of stress and shame and comparison I carry around unconsciously. It makes me wonder what else I could put down, let go. It makes me wonder how I could be kinder to myself, more realistic in my expectations for what constitutes responsible adulthood, goodness, capability. Because, you know, I’m guessing there are a few areas where that might be a good thing to explore. The (former) leak in my roof? Just a leak. We all have them. It’s like that Leonard Cohen line: “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”