All I can say is that my life is pretty plain

I've had the ingredients in the fridge for a few days now, and when I walked home from work this morning I sat down at my computer, stood up again, and said to myself, yes. Today is the day.

Today I will make the dumplings.

I've never made them before, or anything even similar, but I found an easy recipe online. The wrapper is flour and water. The filling is ground pork and napa cabbage. There is some frying, followed by some simmering. There were pictures. There were positive reviews. I could do this.

The important thing, of course, is to learn from your mistakes. I think I know exactly what went wrong, and how to fix it. My problems mostly began when I said "today I will make the dumplings" and the obvious solution, next time, is not to make the dumplings. It all seems so obvious, in hindsight.

But I really did start out ok. I mean, it's hard to chop up cabbage wrong. The dough mixed up fine. I had some technical difficulties estimating the right size for wrapper-to-filling ratio, which resulted in some dumplings the size and shape of a small stegosaurus (I decided to term them "American size," which is a patriotic way of saying they were the Hummers of the smart-car dumpling world) but no matter, dinosaurs are cool, right? I got down my heavy skillet, put a worrying amount of oil in it, and turned on the gas to what I assumed was sort of medium-highish. In go the dumplings. After a minute or two I hear a mysterious shrieking noise, which, it turns out, was some kind of dumpling distress signal. Possibly a battle cry. I watched my little stegosaurus flock with slowly dawning alarm.

It was the oil. It's always the oil.

Bees do not worry me. I can patiently and firmly shove large spikes through small piercings. I sometimes use superglue instead of bandaids. But let hot oil give one small sputtering noise and I am suddenly tap dancing five feet away from where I was standing to begin with. My dream kitchen includes a low, reinforced brick wall in the middle of everything so I'll have something to leap over and duck behind when it all hits the fan.

So it's as I'm tap dancing back and forth in the kitchen, waving a large spoon and making excited yipping noises, that I realize my morbidly obese dumplings are burning over high heat in far more oil than I should ever have introduced to water. I venture a little soft-shoe that takes me close enough to the stove to turn off the burner and slap a cover on the pan and then find myself hiding behind the opened refrigerator door as it spits and hisses on to the lid. Eventually the heat subsided, and the crackling stopped, leaving only the fading whistles of the rubbery, undercooked disasters. I gingerly turned one over and prodded it with a fork, noting the thick layer of char on the bottom. I considered ways to salvage the situation.

Then I carefully scraped the evidence into the trash, cleaned all guilty utensils, wiped off incriminating surfaces, turned on the fan to disperse the lingering aroma of failure, and casually scuttled into my room to sulk and pretend like nothing stupid happened today.

And now here I am writing about it so I'm not sure what the point of that was, exactly. I would make a terrible spy. Like a mime with Tourette's, or a ninja with irritable bowel syndrome, I blow my own cover pretty routinely.