An age of responsibility

Sometimes, being an adult is just no fun.

I'm not even talking about having to get up and go to work and earn a living. I actually like that part. I think it's better than school. There's no homework.

I'm talking about all of the things you have to do that interfere with what it is you REALLY want to be doing. The things you have no choice about. To me the epitome of un-fun adult things is buying toilet paper. You have to have it, you have to spend money on it. But what for? Nothing fun. It serves its routine purpose, then gets flushed down the toilet. Money that once in your life would have been spent on something much more enjoyable because other people bought your toilet paper for you.

I guess there's a certain degree of denial in the fact that I have a tendency to put off any of these adult things if I can help it. For years, there were little pockets of my apartment that went unkempt, as I just closed the doors of closets and the laundry room pretending like there wasn't a mess behind them.

But for some reason, Friday turned out to be a day of reckoning.

I've been driving around for a few weeks suspecting that my car needed new tires. It was starting to do that vibrating thing whenever I went above 60 on the Interstate. I'm not car savvy enough to just look at the tires and evaluate the treading.

I finally brought myself to take the car in for an "oil change" Friday morning. This is my general strategy in car maintenance. To take my car in and hope that if there's something wrong with it they will tell me. I was not surprised when the guy called me about the tires.

"I don't know if you're aware," he said. "But the treading is totally gone on your two front tires.

"Oh," I said trying to sound shocked. "Really?"

I told him to go ahead and replace them.

In the spirit of this coming to terms with my adult responsibility, I decided to spend the better part of my Friday night tackling another area of avoidance - my oven.

Let's just say there was a small pool of something that's been accumulating there for God knows how long. I had no idea what it was (it could have been any great number of things) or how long it had been there. But I've been telling myself that it's an oven, and ovens are meant to get dirty. I figured there was no harm in just leaving it for a little bit longer.

Then a few weeks ago my friend Melissa hurled me into reality when she went to heat some pita bread in the oven at the Iron Chef part.

"Um, Tiffany... I have to tell you something," she said. "I don't know if you've noticed, but I'm really worried about this oven. There's something that looks like grease pooled up on the bottom. It's probably a fire hazard."

"Oh," I responded, trying to sound like this was a news flash. "Really?"

Thus began the party conversation about whether I a) had a fire extinguisher and b) knew how to use my fire extinguisher.

After Melissa brought it up, I started to get paranoid. Yes, it must really be "that bad" if other people were starting to notice. I've been petrified to use my oven. One time I tried it started smoking.

So I vowed that this week I would take care of it once and for all. On Friday, I busted out the kitchen cleaner stuff that is "tough on grease" - I probably went through half a bottle - and the brill pads - went through three of those. At one point I discovered that the mess was caked on there so bad that it was more effective to use a butter knife to kind of scrape it up. Once I got started the obsessive compulsive in me kicked in and I couldn't stop until I got every last bit off.

(I'll take the time here to note I realize this is utterly irresponsible, my mother is probably having a heart attack and I suspect the oven will get added to the list of things that will be inspected on all future visits).

For good measure, I even cleaned the stove and under the burners while I was at it.

I guess the moral of the story is that some things in life need to just be dealt with. Ignoring problems or bad situations will only make them worse, and before you know it you're on the side of the road because your untreaded tire blew out or emblazoned in some sort of kitchen fire. I could have just cleaned up whatever it was in the oven when I spilled it, and it would have been less of a problem.

But now, it's over. I have a nice clean oven that I can cook in.

Now, the homework: to stay on it.

P.S. - I got about halfway through this oven-cleaning project before I finally dipped into a glass of wine. The wine stayed pretty far away from the stove and the grease mess (I know the photo makes it look like even more of a fire hazard). But for a quick photo, it wasn't a problem.