So the other day I was reading Stef's entry here. She's at work and her husband's whining at her to come home and fix him dinner, and the second she gets in the house he's pestering her to make him dinner, whining that he doesn't want to make anything in the house and whining that he doesn't know what he wants, so she should figure it out and cook it for him, 'cause he's HUUUUUUUNGRY!

This paragraph sums it all up:

"Let me get this straight. You don't know what you want, but I have to sit here and play guessing games as to what it is, because everything I suggest will be wrong. You say there's nothing in the house to cook, when really, there's nothing you care to cook. You can't even be bothered to fix a bowl of soup to tide your kid over, because it's the offseason for me and I need to be home fixing your dinner, taking care of your kid, ironing your socks, and sucking your dick in my copious free time. Is that the picture I'm supposed to be getting?"

Can you blame her for pitching a spatula at him? I'd say he deserved it there.

It's all too reminiscent of my parents somehow, minus the spatula. Mom would stagger in the door and Dad would whine about dinner always being so late because she was out doing errands. (We normally ate dinner at about 9 p.m.) She'd usually gripe about it being yet another night where she had to make dinner, AGAIN, and think of something to make, AGAIN, and how she was so tired of the eternal dinner question. This is why we ate out at least once a week. And you wondered where I got it from.

Dad is incredibly picky at times, usually involving going out. He never knows what he wants, he wants you to pick where to go, but he never likes ANYWHERE that you pick. I got so sick of that game every Friday night (out night) that I finally made him a list of restaurants in town and out of town grouped by price and type of food and told him, "YOU are picking from now on. YOU'RE the most finicky one, you don't like where anyone picks, YOU PICK." This was about the one time that standing up to my dad actually worked, as I keep insisting that he pick to this day. And there's much less bitching when HE gets to be in charge about it. (Story of my life, eh?)

Of course, Dad wouldn't lift a finger in the kitchen most of the time. Back when he still could, he might do dishes sometimes, or help barbeque in the summer. But the only dish he knew how to make was a noodle dish (elbow macaroni, a tiny bit of sauce, and ground beef) passed down in his family.

The dish is called "lazy woman."

LAZY WOMAN. Nothing about the content of the food, it's just the kind of crap dish that a LAZY WOMAN who doesn't want to do her job that night would make to eat. (Or in this case, a lazy man.)

In case you couldn't tell, I have always hated the name of this dish. I find it pretty offensive.

I don't really like cooking. You know that already. I'm not that interested in slaving away for however long it takes to make myself something to eat that's Healthy and Good For You when I could just eat crap for ten minutes and be done with it. I'm fairly bored when cooking and tend to lose interest in checking the oven every few seconds to see if it's turned the precise shade of brown yet. I seem to lean towards the Tucker side of the scale, though I'm not bad enough that I'd rather pop a pill for nutrients. I'd just rather get food made by anyone else than me. I know it's one of those things that everyone Has to do, it's so much cheaper to make from scratch, it's better for you, blah blah Ilovecookingcakes, but the rationalness of that has yet to make me truly desire to become a fabulous cook that everyone wants to eat her tasty yummy food.

(Right, me, want to make food for OTHERS to eat? Are you crazy? Hey, at least this way I don't have to host dinner parties.)

There's also another reason why I don't want to learn how to be a good cook. It's simply this: I don't want to be trapped into doing the cooking. I feel like once I learn how, I'll end up stuck always doing it. Which, I guess, is the exact point that people are trying to make when they tell me I should cook- that I should be stuck doing it for life instead of always heading for takeout. Maybe occasionally I might feel like making cookies or something, but dammit, I don't want to do it all the time. It's still not fun.

Nor do I want to end up always cooking dinner every night by default because I'm the woman, or I get home early (assuming that we do move in together and he keeps the job he has now, he works afternoons to 9 p.m.), or whatever. I know he doesn't want to do all of it and has said as much, but I still fear the whole idea of it happening, simply because I have a vagina and this somehow equals Domestic Goddess in the eyes of the world. I fear that we'll both fall into the unconscious "traditional" patterns somehow upon living together and/or marriage whether we intend to or not, and I'll find myself becoming my mother, griping about what to make for dinner every damn night. It's one thing when it's just you, but it's quite another when you have to please someone else with your cooking.

In general, this seems to be how I cope with anything household. Not only do I completely not care how things look, I deliberately don't WANT to learn how to do any of it well. If I can't do it well, than nobody can force me to do it and always do it, right?

Well, that's my logic, anyway.

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