I like to think I was justified in my decision.

The first warning should have come when I opened not one, but two packets of the vile stuff — largely due to its seemingly small size, and my hunger which can only be described as “immense”. The whiff of the artificial cheese-like powder assaulted my nostrils like a legion of tiny trebuchets, the kind of vile stale-cheddar aroma that is reserved only for the most cheaply-made of cheesesque foodstuffs. Driven on by my terrible urge to feed, in went both packets to the requisite combination of milk, water and butter, in to the churning abyss which — while at once fairly tranquil — soon resembled a boiling pit of sulphur, threatening (and occasionally succeeding) to spill over and forever taint the surface of my oven. The aroma surrounding the pan was one I won’t soon forget, a sickening stench of stale cheddar, the vivid yellow colour — my phone camera hardly doing it justice — merely adding to the experience.

The real tragedy of the story is that a large portion of this disgusting maelstrom has ended up squarely in my stomach, through equal parts desperate hunger and a desire to avoid wasting money. The flavour is every bit as bad as I’d imagined, punctuated by the occasional, tiny nugget of dry cheese powder which managed to escape the moisture by hiding within one of the tiny pasta tubes, an experience not unlike realizing that raisin you just bit down on is actually a spider. While perhaps not my most harrowing mealtime experience, it ranks up in the top twenty or so.

And so, I must ask you all, for your own safety and mental wellbeing: don’t make the mistake I did. Don’t buy this terrible, terrible mixture. Please.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have an excellent new idea which involves an energy drink shot, some toast, and a few other ingredients.

This is going to be great, I just know it. :3

Today, however, thanks to a severely defective sleep pattern and an ever-growing, ravenous hunger caused by sheer apathy towards preparing foodstuffs, I stumbled upon a solution of sorts: it seemed likely — probable, even — that I’d still be awake at the hallowed hour of “breakfast”, and that perhaps — finally — I could partake in this long-awaited dream which so long had evaded me. Being an occasional purveyor of and living close to a McDonalds (now, now, don’t look at me like that — their Chicken Selects are actually fantastic), I hurriedly opened their website and browsed through the selection of offerings, enthusiasm growing with each passing moment.

Finally, my will — or, perhaps more accurately, my stomach — had settled on the fabled Double Sausage & Egg McMuffin, which seemed to not only satisfy the urge to sample the unattained, but also combined two food products which rate high on my list, that being eggs and sausages. Truly, this was the Holy Grail and nothing could stand in the way of my hunger crusade. The hours ticked by until reaching a time when I was fairly certain the blessed establishment would open, and burrito’d up in layers of clothing and a scarf to ward off the icy weather, I embarked upon my journey with high spirits, soon arriving at my destination. Victory was in sight!

The first pang of disappointment was in the size of the package. Yes, yes, I’m sure we’ve all been there before, but in all seriousness it was only when I unwrapped the shapeless lump that I began to experience regret for the first time in days, the rather sorry-looking miscreant dripping swiftly-congealing grease onto the table, a shrivelled and pale shadow of the sacred manna my mind had envisaged. They say you can’t judge a book by its cover, but this adage was also proven wrong as I took that first, regretful bite, a flavour which scarce needs describing for I’m sure your imagination can fill in the blanks. This was the light at the end of the tunnel, the goal I had so long sought? This pathetic excuse for food, which I could finish only through sheer force of will?

The moral lesson of the day, then, is that the more unattainable something seems, the more our minds are wont to build grand visages of unreachable wonders. It’s easy to wish for that which we do not have, especially that which seems difficult or impossible to ever reach, while losing sight of the things we already have — and, often, turn out to be preferable. The same could be said for all things in life, both material possessions and even people (this moral tale could easily apply to one or two of my exes, though I shall speak no more on the matter). In a nutshell, don’t wish too hard for what you don’t have, because it’s probably terrible anyway. If you reach for the stars, you’ll only end up discovering them to be little more than burning balls of gas.

And then you’ll be burned to a cinder in the million-degree-hot inferno, you short-sighted dumbass.

Life’s been interesting, which is to say, it’s been up and down like a rollercoaster but never fails to beat the tedious drudgery that I’d experience without the chaos. My programming projects have been put on temporary hold lately as I’ve been focusing on World of Warcraft and my electronics project, suffering the relentless and thoroughly unwelcome, oppressive heat of the summer and other associated annoyances that come with this most loathesome of seasons, and both pondering and happily resolving a few confusions and points of contention regarding relationship-related matters. I don’t usually mention much related to my love-life on this blog for a number of reasons, but let me assure those of you who care about my mental stability that things could not be better right now on that front.

Oh, and I walked face-first into a street sign that was far too low yesterday, because the sun was in my eyes and making it hard to see where the hell I was going. Normally I wouldn’t admit this at all, but I know for a fact that people are going to ask what’s with the cuts and bruises, and I’m not nearly manly enough to be able to lie and say it was the result of a bar-fight, and you should have seen the other guy.

In conclusion: Life rocks, and my face is pretty much okay. That is all.

It’s not just this, though, but any occurrence of this inexplicably dull sport which seems to evoke the most primive and violent natures from these already low-brow plebians. Going anywhere near a public place before, during, or after any kind of match which seems to hold some ridiculous significance to these simians is practically a death sentence, due to their unfortunate nature to riot furiously and violently if “their” team loses the game, a haze of bloodlust hanging over them like a cloud. Similarly, if the team they “support” — and I use that word in the loosest manner possible — wins a game, they seem equally overcome with primal fury, destroying and fighting everything in their path as their uncontrollable wrath leaves broken windows and empty beer cans in its wake. This, perhaps, is the most bizarre aspect of the whole experience, as if every fan is simply a ticking time-bomb, waiting for the moment to explode in bestial anger regardless of the game’s outcome!

I can’t even begin to understand why sports of most kinds tend to bring out the worst, most primal and aggressive natures of ordinarily air-brained yet harmless peons — though it mostly seems to focus around the more physical of sports, ones that involve a lot of running, since I’ve rarely heard of a chess riot, or police being called in to deal with enraged snooker fans.

Truth be told, though, that’d be quite hilarious to observe.

(Image courtesy of my blogging compadre, Gorse.)

That’s what got me thinking about gaming as a whole, and the bizarre system of effort and reward that we as gamers seem to impose upon ourselves. Of course achievements in games like World of Warcraft or on systems such as the Xbox 360 and Steam — or a rose by any other name, such as “trophies” on the PlayStation 3 — are the perfect example of this mentality in action, I feel it’s only a relatively new coat of paint on the surface of something much older. Remember when you were a kid hanging out in the video-game arcades of the 80′s and 90′s, marvelling at the high-score tables populated and dominated by those elite few with the seemingly unattainable skills needed to occupy such a throne? Or as a more domestic example, something every gamer should be familiar with: The urge to beat the level, defeat the boss, to press onward and explore new territory, or simply to beat a score and achieve some measure of satisfaction from the knowledge that your skill and dedication could be quantified by digits glowing on a phosphor screen.

This, I feel, is something endemic and intrinsic to the gamer mindset, and yet the intangible appeal fails to make any logical sense in my mind. We push ourselves to incredible lengths for the sake of achievement and improvement in an artificial system which exists solely for the sake of providing challenge where there would otherwise be none. An extreme case of this would be the Korean gamer who quite literally killed himself by playing too much StarCraft; more common examples can be seen all around us. Who out there wearing the moniker of “gamer” can honestly say they haven’t spent a weekend or more shut away in a darkened room, hunched over a screen, thoroughly absorbed in one of these faux-simulacra?

Is it simply human nature to constantly push ourselves further, so desperate for self-improvement and so eager for accolade that we are inherently drawn to such a medium? The overwhelming popularity of gaming as a whole on a worldwide scale would seem to imply a certain truth in this logic, though I can’t help but feel as though something is missing. Can it really be that simple? In the end, are we still just a bunch of apes who’ll push a button all day long if it means we’ll get a bunch of bananas and a pat on the head?

And there it is. Perfect. Pure. This is what I wanted in my stomach today. Oh yes.

To say I don’t cook very often would be an understatement; in fact, I’d go as far as to suggest that the vast majority of my diet is based upon microwaved ready-meals and various pre-made concoctions that come in tins. Occasionally I’ll branch out and experiment — such as the time I successfully re-heated cooked sausages by using a toaster — but for the most part, it’s best for everyone’s sake that I refrain. Today, I decided to attempt an ill-fated experiment with making enchiladas, courtesy of an Old El Paso meal kit. Having had excellent results from the nachos kit in the past, what could go wrong?

As it turns out, a great deal.

Given that the kit provides enough food for 3-4 people, I decided to go halves on the ingredients. Easy — I’d bought two packs of cooked chicken and a bag of grated cheese, but it was easy enough to separate the cheese and only open a single pack of chicken. The pre-heating the oven and slicing the chicken parts went pretty well, too, though of course I got a couple of oil splashes from stir-frying said chicken. The fail begins when I was instructed to mix the “spice mix” powder with hot water, and combine that with both sachets of tomato sauce. I did so, splashing tomato substance all over the kitchen and myself numerous times in the process, and it was only after I looked upon my creation with pride before I remembered the whole halves thing.

Shit.

I feel like a kid on Christmas Eve who just discovered Santa isn't real.

Time to fry up more chicken and acquire more minor oil-burns (including, of course, fumbling and pouring far too much oil into the pan), realizing the bowl wasn’t even big enough to combine the new quantities of chicken and cheese required and thus having to combine them clumsily into a larger bowl (more spillage), chicken going everywhere as I tried to combine the un-mixed and mixed parts together. But surely, even if I end up with too much food, it can’t go wrong now?

Wrong again. Now it comes to spooning the filling into the tortillas, during which point I somehow managed to get spicy tomato sauce all over my leg without even fully understanding how. I also realized that the baking tray it required was currently used to house the sauce/cheese/chicken mixture, requiring yet another messy transfer before my truly appalling attempts to wrap the filling in the circles of corn and wheat. And then I realize the baking tray is far, far too small, requiring the kind of desperation that only a starving chef could appreciate, literally forcing the things down into a barely-coherent mass in the tray, my miscalculations on filling size providing less and less in each tortilla, which helped only slightly. Pouring on the rest of the sauce and the remainder of the cheese, more tomato goodness went everywhere.

Finally — not sure if the tray is oven-safe or not but hardly caring at this point — I thrust it into the kiln-like depths and awaited the result.

The results: Not quite as advertised, though I blame myself entirely for this failure. A mass of gooey, red-and-yellow sludge topped with what almost resembles elbow macaroni, concealing beneath a sad, crushed amalgm of god only knows what, forced into far too small a space with all the wrong quantities, begging to be eaten just so it can be put out of its miserable existence.

And this is why I’m not a chef.

No philosophical discussion is complete without stick-figure diagrams.

Yesterday, I had a discussion on theology/philosophy with a couple of Mormon missionaries, largely concerning the issue of omnipotence vs. the fallacy of free will. I don’t think they were really expecting me to whip out the whiteboard and dry-erase markers, but it seemed to go over pretty well. I was actually surprised by the outcome — they stumbled a little at first, clearly not expecting the question, but managed to formulate a fairly adequate response. The gist of the conversation ended with the conclusion that even though God knows what choice I’m going to make (the little stick-man in the box with the branching paths represents me), that doesn’t influence or affect the fact that I still had the choice in the first place.

Now, I could have gone more philsophical and argued that knowledge of the future does in fact invalidate any possible notion of free will, and even without the presence of some heavenly overlord, this concept troubles me from time to time purely from the perspective of science (we are, after all, composed of matter which acts in predictable and logical ways). But I’ll give them credit for trying, especially as I’m sure neither of them expected to have such a thing thrust upon them without warning.

Maybe next time.

The rest of the conversation pretty much went as could be expected, and I had time a-plenty to clarify a few things I’ve been hazy on. I’m not about to be “converted” or choose a religion any time soon, but I like to think I keep an open mind, and this is one angle I simply haven’t given much attention to in the past. I know plenty enough about Catholicism, I’ve read into Taoism and Buddhism, but those Mormons always just seem so damn happy, and I want to know what their secret is. And then I’ll ask one of those monks in orange robes who always hang out on streets and seem to constantly act like they just won the lottery last week and things could not be better.

Somewhere along the line, I just decided that I was tired of life being predictable, dull, and largely falling into the trap of same shit, different day. There’s something fundamentally satisfying about just breaking out of that routine and walking down a path you’d never normally take, just to see where it leads you.

Mostly, I wish this was possible because then I’d have this pop up inside a large, angry, hazard-line box.

Oh, c’mon. You know that’d be awesome.