The three things I fear most:
1) cooking
2) cantaloupe
3) spiders

I’ll tell you why.

Let’s start with the obvious: spiders.
When I was twelve years old, doing my duty of trimming the lawn, I bent down to move a large rock out of the way (heading my father’s advice to never put the trimmer blade over a rock for fear it would ricochet up to my eye socket and leave me blind), just as I reached the tip of the rock it sprung eight legs and scurried up the fence.

I did what any rationale twelve year old girl would do …shrieked and ran away.

I fear spiders. I am completely aware of the fact that it is irrational, ridiculous and quite silly. But I do.

Cantaloupe.
Actually, I fear ordering any fruit in a restaurant.

Every time I order a fruit salad it comes with cantaloupe. Blahhhhk!  Cantaloupe contaminates everything it touches. Cantaloupe juice leaks out of each little rind and infects the strawberries, bananas, blueberries and raspberries with toxic cantaloupe taste.

Watermelon I can live with, but cantaloupe is just icky and restaurants are quite nonchalant about where they put it — like on my plate!

Cooking.
I love eating, but I hate cooking. It drives me crazy. I don’t like the planning, the measuring, the recipe following. If it were just up to me, I could exist on coffee and granola with a heap of salad on the side, thank you very much.

That was a long story to tell you this: I failed.
I am no longer cooking. My strategy to cook every other day has fizzled. I am a total failure in the culinary department. I just stopped doing it. It was part of my promise to cook every other day, and I’m not.

It makes me think: Maybe I bit off more than I can chew?

It’s like Goal Setting 101.
So, now, instead of cooking every other night, I will do the food shopping. Start at square one, first base, walk before I run… you get the picture.

I am still learning what goes into my food (as well as where the hell they keep the ground mustard in the grocery store). In the meantime, I am very fortunate to have a partner who loves to cook.

I can do lots of wonderful things in the world with my skills and talents, but whip up a chemistry experiment (a.k.a. dinner) with raw ingredients is not yet in my repertoire. And that’s okay.

Maybe I am afraid of failure. Maybe I just don’t value spending time in front of the stove. Maybe, I just need to find more motivation. I don’t know.

I do know this:
If it is not working, try something else.
And, shopping! That, I can do.

Tags: canteloupe, cooking, failure, fear, food, shopping, spiders