he who makes a paradise of his bread makes a hell of his hunger

    Sometimes it's just not meant to be.

    This morning, I was only a couple of minutes late for work. Went into the kitchen to make a sandwich for lunch. As I was pulling the bread out of the bag, I thought, "This loaf has lasted a long time. Nice!" As I dropped it into the container and reached for the peanut butter, my attitude changed; that was when I saw the deep scale of mold reaching across the bottom crust of both pieces. I lifted the bag and inspected the remainder. Unsurprisingly, it was all affected. No sandwich for lunch.

    This evening, I finally got settled enough to bake the cake I've been meaning to take to work for a while. It's a scratch recipe, rather complicated, but I [foolishly] assumed I had all the ingredients, since I'd located the one that I don't usually have on hand--lemon pudding mix. I preheated the oven and started mixing the batter, and while doing so I read ahead to the ingredients for the glaze; damn it, I don't have any orange juice. Since it's poured over the cooled cake, though, I knew I could take the rest of the glaze ingredients, buy orange juice on the way to work, mix it and pour it there, and no one would know or care that it had been freshly done. Problem solved.

    Until, that is, I got to the point in the directions where I needed to add the eggs. It called for four. I had...none. Two eggs' worth of Egg Beaters, but no actual eggs. A glance at the clock revealed that the local grocery store was closed (24 minutes prior). I could change clothes and drive to the chain on the edge of town, to buy two freakin' eggs (and some orange juice, of course, and naturally some bread while I'm there), drive back home, finish mixing the cake, bake it for nearly an hour, cool it, and glaze it--all before going to bed for what would undoubtedly be a restful sleep.

    Or I could do what I did, which was to turn off the oven, scoop the beginnings of the batter into a sealed bowl, plop it in the fridge, and resolve to buy donuts for work. It really, really wasn't meant to be.

[title quotation by Antonio Porchia, from Voces, trans. by W.S. Merwin]