Letting My Dork Flag Fly - or - I'm Making Dough

I’m wearing an apron; something that I don’t believe a man should do unless he is BBQ-ing, which I am not. I am baking bread, from scratch, again. I usually don’t wear an apron, but I don’t want to get flour on my Gangster shirt, a gift from my brother and his wife. It’s not really a shirt that a gangster would wear. It has this picture of a tacky, schmaltzy, Leave-It-To-Beaver, Wonder Bread looking white dude with slicked back hair and sparkling white teeth, and he is tossing up the West Side gang sign. The shirt reads, “I noticed that you’re gangster… I’m pretty gangster myself.” So, it’s more kitschy than gangster. In essence, it makes fun of white people, and, ironically enough, white bread. Baking bread is a long process. Three hours, mostly waiting. It gives a guy a chance to do other things between the mixing, the kneading and the baking. Right now I’m at the baking part, which is the final step. 20-30 minutes in the oven at 425° or until the top is golden brown. Tapping the bottom of the loaf should produce a hollow sound, that’s when you know it’s done. What this all means is that I don’t need to wear this apron anymore, but I figure I’ll should just keep in on until the whole damn process is over and done with. I should probably get the dough out from under my nails. Nah, it looks good there, proves I've done something today. It's interesting for me to note that an underemployed man’s work is never done. Over the last three hours, I’ve feed my snake, changed the water in my goldfish bowl, played Soduku, Kakuro, and Mah Jong, made a mix tape for a someone who is 8000 miles away, finished one book, started another, listened to the entirety of Frank Zappa’s, Joe’s Garage, unnecessarily explained to my landlord why my rent will be two weeks late, listened to my brother tell me The Aristocrats joke, updated my personal calendar to include my old job which I got back earlier this week, watered and fertilized my plants, changed a light bulb, played some bass, bought a ticket to see The Watchmen, checked my e-mail at least a hundred times, noticed that only one of the blogs I read has been updated recently (Ally is consistent and more than entertaining), made a list of my current totally unachievable crushes of which there are four, swept some of the flour off the floor, shrugged off cleaning my desk for another day, resoldered some broken audio cables, and swore off finishing sentences with prepositions… for the afternoon. Bread’s done. It’s tasty.

* The Amazing Adventures of