Albumen
You crack a few eggs into the mixing bowl for your morning scramblies, but before you can whisk them up into a frothy jumble you notice a piece of broken shell suspended in the egg whites, and you think to yourself “well, that won’t do,” so you reach for a spoon and try to retrieve it only to discover that it won’t stay on the spoon on account of all those curious properties of liquids you learned about in high school physics, like specific density, viscosity and surface tension, that work to keep a solid object – in this case a fleck of egg shell – from sinking to the bottom of a liquid denser than itself or for that matter from staying on a spoon, and after numerous, frustrating, failed attempts, you think to yourself “to hell with the spoon” and you stick a finger into the mixing bowl and try to recover the egg shell digitally, but the egg shell doesn’t want to come to your finger either, and the chase is on – like a cheetah after a speedy antelope – zigzagging along the flat portion of the mixing bowl and ramping up the curved wall 360 degrees around until (finally!) you feel this elusive fragment submit beneath your fingertip (even though it’s barely perceptible and you are not 100% sure it is really under there), but you don’t dare lift up to look or the damn thing will escape and you will have to start all over again, so slowly you begin to drag you finger up the side of the mixing bowl until your finger is safely above the surface of the albumen, and then you drag it a little more until you reach the top of the bowl where you tweeze the eggshell between your thumb and finger to insure that you really have this thing safeguarded, and then – with dramatic intensity – you flick the tiny piece into the sink and wash it down the drain as you rinse the sticky goop from your fingers, the whole bloody affair so farcical it leads you to surmise that there must be a better way to accomplish this task, you’re just not aware of it – that fry cook, for example, the one with the long hair sticking out of his baseball cap and the bad eczema on his arms that works down at the greasy hole-in-the-wall restaurant where you like to go for breakfast before work, he must crack a few hundred eggs a day, he doesn’t just reach into the bowl with his fingers and…I mean, you’ve never seen him with his hand in the…no, surely there’s another way, a professional technique, a trick of the trade, you’ll figure it out one day – now go enjoy your scrambled eggs for God’s sake and don’t give it another thought.
9:26:21 PM  Random Nonsense
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