[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]
I’m making meatballs for the weekend, and like all the best meatball recipes, the key ingredient in mine is lies. There’s a lot of time spent between minimal exertions of effort. It really is easy, but there’s a fine tradition of pretending to pretend that you didn’t mind cooking – which you barely did – at all. You have to master saying “Oh, it was nothing,” when it really was nothing so it sounds like it you were saying it was nothing when we all know it was something, but you guys are worth it. Oh, Stop it. Really.
I wrote about the recipe and duplicitous grandmotherly types at OT almost a year ago. Feel free to give it a go, but if you’re going to pretend to take a long time putting dinner together, you’d best cover your tracks and get work complicit in the cover story by ducking out of the job mid-Friday. That way, if anybody doubts you spent all day slaving over a hot stove instead of mixing stuff up in a bowl, popping it in the oven while you do gods know what, and then briefly checking in to finish things off with a few hours of unattended simmering, you can say, “Oh yeah? Well, I wasn’t at work, though I’d prefer you not check because then they might think I wasn’t really sick.”
It’s POETS Day. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Mangia!
But first, some verse.
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I could have sworn I’d already done a POETS Day on Keats. This week I’ve been reading about him with a mindset intent on shutting out basic biography I must have covered previously. I figured that, mistakenly but mistakenly was ascendant, having done Keats I’d done “Ode on a Grecian Urn” because that’s the one you have to do even if you’re going through the motions to have it behind you, field cleared for stuff people might not already know.
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The Columbo Game 