Mari Ness - Embarrassing confession time:

I can't boil an egg.

Mind you, I can fry up an egg with the best of them. Scramble an egg. Make a nice omelet. Benedict the egg, if I'm really up to it. I made a kickass chicken curry last night (if I do say so myself) and I'll put my spaghetti up against anyone else's spaghetti, and I can dial up a pizza with the best of them. (I add this hastily before various skeptics start complaining about my inability to roast a chicken. I can roast a chicken. I just haven't done it for parties.) So, you know, food, in general, I'm ok at. Boiling eggs, not so much.

I know. I know. I hear it all the time. "It's as easy as boiling an egg."

This is what happens when other people boil eggs:

1) They boil water.

2) They put the egg in the water.

3) They wait a specific period of time, nod briskly, and take the egg out of the water.

It's astounding, and I admire them for it.

This is what happens when I boil an egg:

1) Start boiling water. Completely forget that water is boiling for some time. Return and find that this process must start all over again.

2) Boil water a second time. Promise self that really, this time the reading will stop after four minutes, tops. Just in time to get the water boiling. Astound self by actually managing to accomplish this. Find that water is not, in fact, boiling. Realize that this is just proof of what you've been saying all along, that physics is not in fact as mathematical and regular as various people keep claiming it is because clearly it takes different amounts of time for water to boil and I'm proving it, which just explains the difficulties with hurricane prediction. Decide to keep reading book.

3) Blame book when water boils for too long again.

4) Repeat steps 1 to 3. Rescue egg from refrigerator where it has been leading either an anxious life, preparing for death, or a contemplative life, preparing for death, wondering what on earth it had done to not have the opportunity to become a little chicken and then get slaughtered that way, or, a life of blissful ignorance and amazement that it had gotten to see really cool things, like, you know, a Styrofoam container, which if you're an egg without a lot of experience is just way cool. (And on a disturbing note, Microsoft Word automatically capitalizes Styrofoam. Who knew? Of course this is the same word processing program that also automatically capitalizes Smurf, which is a far more depressing thought.) Decide that eggs shouldn't be spending all of this time thinking and instead should be abruptly boiled in water.

5) Take egg to pot.

6) Drop egg in pot.

7) Break egg, watching egg whites swirl happily around the pot in a zen like fashion, entirely unlike a perfectly boiled egg.

On occasion I have varied this by attempting to put the egg in the pot with a spoon, which breaks the egg faster, or putting the egg in the water pre boiling, which then means that I have no idea how long the egg has cooked, although I suppose you can't actually overboil an egg, or just scrambling the darn egg, which is the easier approach.

Sigh. Sometimes, it's the simple things in life that slide right past me. Or break, in this case.