how to date a baker

Are you dating a baker?

Does your significant other enjoy making delicious desserts, rather than dinners?

Does your boyfriend or girlfriend bake elaborate cakes, delectable brownies, and perfect cookies, but then eat a frozen pizza for dinner?

If so, you may be dating a baker. Being a baker, I have some helpful tips for how to date one of us.


Keep a well-stocked pantry.
Flour! Butter! Sugar! Fine kosher salt (not coarse salt)! Semisweet chocolate chips! Keep these kinds of things around, and your baker will be drawn to your apartment like a bee to a field of wildflowers.

Learn to cook.
Many bakers don't cook. Cooking stresses us out with its wishy-washy imprecision. Chances are, if a baker is making a savory dish, it's not in the way that any normal cook would.

If you learn to cook, your baker will think you are awesome. You do something that the baker does not, and therefore are interesting. Since you cook, you also provide sustenance that a baker cannot provide for him or herself. If a baker is a monkey, you are like a banana tree. Basically, you are the best thing in the world.

Make sure your baker is not stressed.
Since baking well is fairly time consuming, some of us do it only when we have time, and many of us do it when we don't have time but are incredibly stressed. If your baker is making cookies at an illogical time, make sure to talk to him or her, to determine if something stressful is going on.

If you do so, your baker will think you are an incredibly sensitive and awesomely observant individual!

Also, don't be a dirtbag (general good advice for any relationship) by stressing your baker out on purpose just to get baked goods. I've never heard of anyone ever doing this, but I do wonder if it happens since so many bakers I know produce cookies when stressed. We are like some kind of oddly evolved animal with a TERRIBLE survival mechanism.

When purchasing baking things for your baker, use caution.
Baking is practically a science. The people who like it are precise about their ingredients and picky about their tools. If you want to get your baking significant other something for the kitchen, make sure to take requests before you go out and buy something. Otherwise, your baker will feel like a pirate who has received a not-very-piratey hat.

Follow these tips! Be good to your baker, and you can look forward to a relationship full of delicious cookies, amazing pies, and awesome cakes. Good luck!

injuries

Injuries happen. If you are me, injuries will occur regardless of whether I am doing anything dangerous or not.

For this reason, I feel like it is important to play a sport. Because, I don't like explaining how I get injured, but I also don't like to lie directly.

If I play a sport, I can just make statements about my life, and allow people to draw their own conclusions.

Sometimes, though, playing sports is difficult. In this case, I think it is important to acquire a potentially dangerous job or hobby that actually contains no danger at all.

That way, injuries created for no reason at all suddenly have meaning. Hooray!

hail

I really dislike hail. Disregarding ultimate consequences (floods, snow-ins, etc), it is the only weather pattern that is immediately dangerous when it falls on you. This makes it really inconvenient for everyone.

Actually, my least favorite weather pattern is "wintry mix," because I always want it to be an ice cream. But it never is. It's just gross, wet, cold mixture of rain, snow, and hail.

I do, however, like imagining what goes on inside a wintry mix, because I bet that the rain and snow feel the same way about the hail as I do.

I guess the only advantage to hail is that, as a word, it is used in many non-weather phrases. Which makes me laugh.

In political programming:

In sports or religious programming:

And, perhaps most prominently, in sci-fi programming:

Dammit, Jim! I'm a doctor, not a weatherman!

bell collar removal

We recently decided the bell collar on our cat was too loud and removed it. But now, the cat is totally silent all the time. We never know where he is. So it is like we are living with a ghost.

Stuff disappears, and we don't know where it went. Stuff gets thrown around, poltergeist style, seemingly from nowhere.

Moreover, though, the loss of my cat's collar has made me feel like my cat is a weird deviant. I mean, a collar is the only scrap of clothing a cat can have. Once that is gone, a cat is totally naked.

Loss of collar causes opposites.

My cat seems to really enjoy his time without his collar. Which partially makes me feel like he is a weird kleptomaniac deviant who loves to run around naked and steal all my pens. But mostly, since getting him to wear the collar in the first place was a struggle (he hates having things around his neck), I feel like he's flaunting his nakedness as a symbol of his freedom as a naked wild animal.

But the joke is on him, because I got him a sweater.

A winner is me!

post-its

Post-it notes are fun. I guess they are supposed to be used for reminders, but I use post-its for almost everything except for reminders.

Usually, I do post-it origami. It works particularly well if you manage to expose the sticky side on one end.

You can also play dress-up with post-its. Here are some examples.

The best thing, though, is to combine these alternative post-it usages in order to become:

The post-it pirate is fearsome. The post-it pirate does not care if you have many post-its or only one. The post-it pirate will take your post-its for herself!

I like the post-it pirate. I imagine that she is a frightening yet righteous marauder that punishes office post-it hoarders by stealing their post-its and redistributing them to needy office workers. Indeed, the post-it pirate is the Robin Hood of our modern life.

Sadly, the post-it pirate is mere fiction. However, sometimes when I see a particularly bad post-it hoarder in my office, and a certain temptation arises...

migraine headache

Yesterday, I had the worst migraine headache I'd ever had.

I basically only get migraines when this happens:

So after I have finally finished my exam, or written that paper, or whatever else I was worried about, I want to be doing this:

But instead, my brain has me doing this:

The funny thing about my migraines is that they happen so infrequently that I don't notice the symptoms. It usually goes like this:

This has happened to me several times, and yet I still never see it coming. When it comes to migraines, I react the way I imagine a medieval peasant reacted to eclipses.

Watch out for migraines, people! Recognize the signs with this handy acronym!

duck boat

Whoever made the duck boat had a great idea.

As a tourist on a duck boat, I would like to imagine myself riding an actual duck.

Duck boats are great. But perhaps not appropriately named. Because a duck boat, if it is really like a duck, should also fly.

This means that a real duck boat should be more than a combination boat/car. It should be a boat/car/plane!

When compared to the REAL duck boat (pictured above), current duck boats just seem inadequate. In fact, I would like it if we re-named the current duck boats to something that more accurately describes its function. Here are some suggestions.

Therefore, please join me in suggesting to duck boat companies that they rename their franchise Turtle Boat, or Swimmer Guy Boat.

Although despite any name changes, I don't think they could rival the boat concept I like to call "best boat ever":