Word of the day: Fork

Due to popular demand, I am devoting an entire blog entry to a household object that does not receive nearly enough credit for its brilliance. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the fork. I honestly do not have any particular fondness for forks, although I recognize that they generally help me to "keep it classy" while eating. I do, however, enjoy ridiculous scenarios, and the fork is a common theme to the 2 ridiculous scenarios that follow:

The Flaming Fork (From an e-mail that I wrote in January. Republished with permission from myself.)
Who catches a fork on fire? Apparently I do. I didn't even know forks were flammable. I went home for a casual, uneventful lunch. I heated up some turkey in a cast iron skillet for my wrap. Then I went about my business eating my wrap and grapes. I thought I smelled something burning, and went to make sure that I had turned the stove off. The red glowing skillet was my cue that maybe I had forgotten that minor detail. And I had also forgotten to take my fork with the blue plastic handle out of it. It goes without saying that the plastic handle was in the midst of a meltdown when I arrived on the scene, and part of it immediately decided to flop over the side of the skillet, onto the burner, and burst into flames. My mind flashed back to the fire extinguisher clause in my lease that said I owed $12.50 if I had to use it. I remember laughing and thinking that the money would be the least of my worries if I was using a fire extinguisher, but thinking to myself that obviously I would never have to cross that bridge. Luckily, I was able to blow out the fire, and a few more minor ones that arose from pools of melted fork material. Then my smoke detector went off, and I was trying wildly to shut it off and take control of the situation. I moved the skillet from the hot burner (which was off by this point) took out as much of the fork as I could (the metal eating part at least), turned on the vent hood over the stove, and opened all of my windows. When I came back to work, I had to close the place back up, so I'm bound to come home to a nice smokey residence. I just hope the smoke detector doesn't decide to start singing while I'm gone.

Dating skills (Shared with permission from the one who doesn't know how to use a fork.)
Last night a friend of mine came over to hang out and be girly. We hit up the usual places (Barnes and Noble and Target), then came back to my place for some girl-talk and the Office. Out of the blue, my girlfriend asks "How do you hold your fork when you cut your food?" Did I mention that this friend is 24 years old? I'm pretty sure I looked at her like she was crazy.

"Which hand to you cut with?" she asked.

"My right" I said (I'm right handed).

"And do you hold your fork like this in the left?" she asked. I looked to see her hand formed as to hold what I can only hope she meant to be an imaginary ice pick...because civilized people certainly don't eat that way (in public anyway).

"No," I told her, "like this," and I showed her the way that we humans do it.

It's really quite hard to cut pretend meat with pretend utensils. I wanted to make sure she had it down, I went to the kitchen and brought back a knife and a fork for each of us to practice. By the end of the ordeal, I'm pretty sure we got her to become a master food-cutter-and-eater.

While I am quite amused that my 24-year old friend only learned to properly hold her fork yesterday, her motivation for doing so is even more impressive: She is preparing for a first date next week (her first first date in awhile). I applaud her efforts to become more refined in the name of love, but the upcoming date is a coffee date. I bet her date will be very impressed if she can gracefully cut and eat her coffee.