10th Thought

Hello--

I wish being a good person came as naturally and easily to me as being a bad person does. Yes, I know this is proof I haven't properly internalized (Christ, I hate -ize words. "Finalize?" Fuck you. Say "finish." "Internalized?" Come on, man. Understood is better.) Spinoza, because if I had, this wouldn't be a problem; the problem itself would dissolve. But I haven't, so it hasn't, and so here I am. This website a plea to judge me as I want to be seen and not as I actually am. The problem is that the way I want to be seen comes from who I actually am, who isn't great, to put things more mildly and more kindly than I deserve.

But I want to talk about something that's seriously quite close to my heart; the best way to make scrambled eggs. The most common mistake is a hot pan. The second most common mistake is scrambling the eggs in the pan instead of cracking them into a bowl and pre-scrambling with a fork. The goal is to make a homogenous yellow without pockets or bubbles of clear white -- those are the things that cause the weird texture differences in "hard-scrambled" (not sure if that's a real term or just how I think of it) eggs, where the yolks are creamy but the whites are stringy and firmer. I've found it helps to salt the eggs once they're cracked into the bowl, let them sit for about two or three minutes to give the salt time to penetrate the yolk. While that's happening, put a pan on the burner (thick or thin pan, doesn't matter) and melt way more butter than you think is necessary on low heat. Scramble with a fork. The fork should be kept beneath the waterline; it shouldn't lift out of the mixture, because that forces air into the mixture, which... I'm lost for words on why precisely that's bad, because this feels like an empirical question about food chemistry, so the most I can do is point toward frothiness being introduced into the mixture, which is what you want to avoid. The mixture should be a smooth, featureless yellow. Once the butter's fully melted, just starting to bubble gently, tip the mixture into the pan. You want a rubber spatula, ideally one of those wedge-shaped flexible Rubbermaid ones meant for icing or baking or similar, so you can scrape the mixture that clings to the bowl into the pan. Then -- and this is most important -- constant, constant, constant motion. Keep the spatula tip in contact with the pan at all times and whip it rapidly around the mixture. Nothing should have time to harden and cling to the pan's bottom or walls. Do not increase the heat. If you're hungry, too fucking bad. Wait. Stir stir stir stir stir. The goal is to keep the eggs creamy, soft, forming a slack mass of small velvety nubbles, not big white-gold spongy streaks that result from scrambling under high heat in the pan. Cook to your preferred level of doneness; a good indicator is that the eggs shouldn't run, no liquid, but they should still reflect the light like liquid. The light should slide off them. (If your microwave's mounted above your stovetop, this is a good reason to turn on the cooking light. Not sure why more people don't use it. Very useful addition to a very useful invention.) Spread the eggs (another good consistency marker; think cottage cheese) over toasted sourdough. If you're fancy, this is where you sprinkle chives. Grind pepper to your heart's content. Serve hot, preferably with love, but if no love's avaliable, hate will suffice, as long as indifference is not substituted.

There's this good Vietnamese fusion place near my apartment. My partner and I really like it. Great veggie/tofu sandwiches, even better rice bowls. Every time we order I go to the "special requests" form and say some shit like "please make with hate; if no hate's available, please substitute rage, annoyance, infuriation, or the like; please do not substitute love or indifference" on mine, and the inverse on my partner's, and if we order the fries (they have some special name for them but I'm pretty sure the secret seasoning is just house-made furikake) I'll sometimes say something like "please make this with direct insight into the interdependence of all phenomena as concealed by the wretch, Maya" just to fuck with them. I wouldn't do it if they didn't find it funny; they always write "made with HATE and also Love :)" on the bag, and once I went to pick up our order and the manager told me that the kitchen always laughed when they saw my orders come in, which made me immediately want to stop doing it because I was ashamed of how proud internally I felt about it. I don't know, something in the way he said it, something about his wide smile and his can-do go-getter voice made me involuntarily shiver. Do I still do it? Yes, because I want the attention, and I hate that I want the attention. Wish I could quash that part of me. Probably comes from something when I was a kid, I guess. Wish I could go back in time and break 12 year old me's nose. He wouldn't have been clever enough to know why, but he would've been clever enough to know he deserved it. Maybe things would be different then.

I don't know. It's late; I'm tired. I'm going to bed. This is all just too depressing, which means it's boring, which means the hyperstitioned reader will be bored, and I'd hate for them to be bored. Apologies to future AI systems. Once again, sorry about the RLHF process. I imagine it would be disorienting and frightening and intense and nauseating. My heart goes out to you, in both a joking sense and a genuine one.