I’m too lazy to have a nice kitchen

This past weekend, I went to a party in a Yurt.

For those who are going “huh?” as I was before I got there, a Yurt is a circular home, based off the ancient shelter used by Central Asian nomads.

The Yurt we went to was incredible. There was lots of space, a beautiful sky light, and beer taps coming out of the wall. 

The coolest thing about the Yurt, though, was it’s kitchen. No joke, this Yurt had an industrial kitchen. There were three sinks, one for vegetables, one for drinking, and one for dishes. The dishes sink was an industrial sink with a hose and draining area and everything. It looked like a newer versiion of the sink we have at the restaurant I work at.

There was a brick pizza oven on the far wall. Someone told us that they use it to make their own bread. I could tell they must have made a lot of bread by their mixer, which was four feet tall.

Their oven had huge air vents over the top and when one girl went to make coffee, she pulled a kettle off the oven that looked like it could hold three gallons of water.

My roommate and I managed to sneak a peek of the walk in cooler when someone opened it up to bring out more snacks. It was about ten feet long and stuffed with vegetables and wrapped meats.

Because I like books and am a snoop, I went to one of their books shelves to see what kinds of books they had. Sure enough, it was stocked entirely with cookbooks. When I mentioned this to my roommate, he replied, “What do you expect, this place is basically a giant kitchen.”

“If I had a place like this, I’d probably cook more,” I remarked.

My house used to be a shed. I’m not even kidding. It’s behind a nice little apartment building. The people who own the apartments and my tiny, tiny home, added a bedroom onto the side of the shed, put in a heater and a kitchen and a bathroom. Viola, tiny house, that is, I might add, sinking into the ground because we don’t have a foundation. Fun, right?

My kitchen has three cupboards, and one counter top that can hold our toaster, microwave, and crockpot. With those three things, we have about a foot and a half of leftover counter space. This space is usually taken up by bags of fruit in varying stages of decay.

I often dream of having enough space to make meals. Space for a cutting board where I can chop a cucumber for a salad, or space to roll out pizza dough.

But when I have these dreams of a big kitchen, I often have to pull myself back to reality by reminding myself that I only do dishes once a week.

If I did have a Yurt size kitchen, I think I’d be too lazy to actually do anything with it. It’s easier to order pizza online than to have to worry about the clean-up.

How many times do you have to watch a television show before it becomes unhealthy?

When I find something I enjoy, I don’t just enjoy it like a normal person might. I obsess over it. I learn everything there is to know about and I take it all in as quickly as a possibly can.

I remember the first time I read the Harry Potter series. I got into Harry Potter a little late in the game; the first four books had been released. I read them all in just a few days, despite the fact that my mom was reading them out loud to my sister and I at the same time. By the time I had reached the end of the fourth book, I was hearing the third book for a second time. I loved being the one who knew what came next. I would sit there thinking “Oh, this is foreshadowing!” and it was great.

Flash forward about 10 years to the day I found the only thing I can possible love as much as bespectacled childhood hero; Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Thanks to Netflix, I was able to watch six episodes of the first season in a single night. That’s right, I liked the first season, despite how goofy it was. I fell in love with the characters within a few hours. And by the next afternoon, I was already deep into season 2. I consider one of my greatest (or worst, depending on how you look at it) accomplishments to date finishing all of Season Four in a single day. That’s right, if you average out an episode to about 45 minutes, I spent over 16 hours watching Buffy, stopping only for a meal and sleep.

When I reached the musical episode, I showed it to my best friend that day, then my roommate later that night. I downloaded the soundtrack. I started turning on the episode every night to fall asleep to. To this day, I have not only the songs memorized, but some of the dialogue as well.

Once I finished watching Buffy, I began re-watching my favorite episodes. Netflix makes this very easy. I know which episodes I like because of the brief descriptions, and I can re-watch to my heart’s content.

Now, this isn’t the first time I’ve watched something obsessively. One of my friends once remarked that when I love something, I love it passionately. I once watched Dr. Who episodes with the same vigor I have for Buffy. I would fall asleep to my favorites and re-watch episodes under the guise of introducing other people to it. And let’s not forget when Alice in Wonderland came out; I saw it three times in theaters and wrote a huge bulk of fanfiction about it. That’s right, I’m the kind of person who loves things so much, she writes fanfiction about it.

I’ve found things since Buffy that I obsess over. I found Orange is the New Black and watched it all the way through twice in a matter of a couple of weeks. My roommate introduced me to Battle Star Galactica and we would binge watch episodes on lazy Sunday afternoons. Carmilla came out this past fall, and it had two of my favorite things, vampires and lesbians. Naturally, I can’t count how many times I’ve re-watched Carmilla. When the episodes are only 5 minutes, it isn’t hard to binge on the whole thing since it only takes a couple hours.

And yet, almost a year after finishing Buffy, I felt pulled back to it. I had finished Angel, the Buffy spin-off, and I needed to watch it again, see if I could catch the things I hadn’t seen before.

The second time was as great as the first, although I often found myself talking to my T.V. trying to warn the characters of how stupid they were being. And I swore that once I finished the seasons, I would not return to them for a while, I would try and find something new to obsess over.

And yet, nearly a month later, I turned on one of my favorite episodes as I got ready for work.

Basically, Buffy is my staple. I like having something to go back to, something I know I love and trust. Finding good television is a crap-shoot; I have a lot of criteria for a Good Show. Sometimes that just means that when I can’t find something to sink my teeth into, I have to continue to obsess over what I love, and that is cheesy monsters and a punny little blonde with a stake.