The Hoarder's Kitchen
Why can't I bring myself to use my beautiful new skillet?
As I have mentioned, I have been working my way through the book “The Artist’s Way.” It has opened my eyes to all kinds of weird things going on in my life.
One of these things is, I hoard things that are new. I refuse to use them!
What opened my eyes to this particular oddity is a cast-iron skillet I bought a few weeks ago. This is a nice skillet, from the Lodge in Tennessee. I bought it because my old cast-iron skillet was driving me crazy. I couldn’t clean it easily, stuff was getting stuck to it, it was annoying me. I know, it is likely my fault, I should have been cleaning it all along and seasoning it and whatnot, however I had to face facts that I was not going to do the required work. And so I bought this new skillet.
Since then the new skillet has just sat on the counter. Innocent, blameless, and shining.
It has been there for weeks!
Meanwhile I continue to struggle with the old skillet. How old is it, you ask? It is centuries old. And I can prove it: The great artist Diego Velazquez painted it, in 1618.
That is my skillet in the picture, I am sure of it.
So why do I cling to this annoying old skillet? OK, there is a little impediment. I am told you have to season a new skillet. I have to look up how to do that and then I have to do it.
Why haven’t I done this, seasoned the skillet? Instead of getting upset with myself, I will just keep drilling down. There must be a block. “The Artist’s Way” has alerted me to blocks. These are handy excuses that get in the way of accomplishing things. In this case my block is YouTube. I would have to look up on YouTube how to season a skillet. And while I am grateful for the info you can find on YouTube, I usually find it annoying. First you get an ad. Next, a long introduction. After that, needlessly complicated instructions complete with unnecessary steps, cautions, and disclaimers. And annoying background music! That too.
Did anyone ever in the history of the world say: “Hey, watch this video on how to season your skillet — they have the greatest background music!”?
No!
There is also another block I have — wasting time on random YouTube videos, often about royalty. You get on YouTube looking for how to season your skillet, and you wind up watching “Wallis and Edward: Why a King Threw Away His Crown.”
End result, as we say here in Buffalo — the beautiful new Lodge skillet sits there.
Why is all this resistance there to begin with? Because I have a thing against using new things.
This must be a common problem. As a kid I remember wanting to hoard my new notebooks and not write in them. I seem to remember other kids had similar thoughts. We do not outgrow them! Recently, my sisters were over at my house. They saw a sketchbook on my dining room table and opened it up excitedly and were actually disappointed that I had filled the sketchbook, that it was not blank! Ha, ha! True story! That was an indoor sketchbook that was not all beat up, which is why they thought it was new.
I do tend to use sketchbooks. I don’t decorate the covers, I don’t do anything, I just throw them into the line. I have about 30 of them stacked up across the room, in various stages of depreciation. They are the exception that proves the rule.
I should get like this about other things, too. I am going to list the things I have bought and not used, starting with this skillet. That would be fun. Maybe that will be my next post.
Then I will start using them.
Damn the torpedoes!