As I mentioned in my previous post, I really did have a pretty good time in San Diego, overall. I was in the mood to sit around in the sunshine and smoke pot, so I wasn’t chomping at the bit to run all over San Diego and explore. I did tell my friend, after I went with her once, that I really didn’t want to go to Mission Bay with her every morning. She seemed okay with that, so she would disappear for an hour in the morning and I would sit on the patio and read, or work on the jigsaw puzzle we had found in the sun room at the back of the house.
It was when I tried to cook food that I began to see some of the stranger side of my friend, and the even stranger relationship she seemed to have with her mother. As I mentioned, the top of the stove was mostly covered with stuff, and the oven was used as storage. That put a bit of a crimp in my plans to fix some simple meals for us, and every time I asked my friend if I could dig out a pan and fix us some soup or something, she would get weird and not want me to use the stove at all, and then pull out more of her cold food, like nuts and dried fruit and muffins. Well, I can only eat so much of that kind of food before I need hot food, but the more I asked, the more my friend dug in her heels. And when I suggested moving a couple of the items on the filled counter to make room for chopping and preparing food, she would insist that nothing be moved from its place. I began to realize two things. My friend actually has something against preparing meals and seems to prefer to snack on finger food virtually all of the time. And she seemed to be afraid to move anything of her mother’s, even though she had grown up in that house and had been staying there alone for a couple of months since her mother went into the hospital and physical rehabilitation center. And, as the long, long story of her and her mother came out over tea and pot on the patio, it also became clear that her mother probably wasn’t ever coming back to live there, as she had decided to move in with her longtime boyfriend.
Because I wasn’t getting anywhere on trying to fix real food, I pretty much gave up. I used the microwave occasionally, but even that wasn’t much of an option because I wasn’t allowed to use more than a small plate or bowl, or a coffee cup and spoon or fork. It was beyond weird. It was obviously something very dysfunctional going on.
I would occasionally get very desperate for hot food, and we would go out to eat sporadically. I couldn’t really afford to eat out, and I’m not very comfortable about somebody else always paying, but I needed hot food badly enough to go along with it. Twice during my visit we went over to a friend’s house for dinner. I grabbed one of those opportunities to buy some food to prepare for everybody (her friend had NO problem letting somebody cook for him in his kitchen), and the other time we ordered pizza. He sent us home with the leftover pizza, most of which was a rather bad vegetarian pizza that had been ordered for my friend. I was thankful to have something to microwave and eat hot, so I ended up consuming the rest of the pepperoni pizza. I left the vegetarian pizza in the fridge for my friend, but she never touched it once. A week later, she still hadn’t touched a single piece of that pizza, so one morning I threw the box in the garbage. OMG. My friend saw the box in the garbage and had a major hissy fit about throwing out food. I told her it was a week old, had been sitting in that cardboard box in the dirty fridge the whole time without being touched, that I figured nobody was going to eat it, and it was getting seriously old. She promptly pulled the box out of the garbage, ate a piece cold to show me how WRONG I was, and put the rest back in the fridge, still in the box. Let’s all say it together this time. DYSFUNCTIONAL.
At that point, I had been there about a week and a half, or maybe close to two weeks. Although I had been cleaning up after myself, keeping the kitchen sink clean and tidy, wiping down the shower after I used it, etc., I felt like I should pitch in and do a little more cleaning. So I decided to clean the toilets and bathroom counters. In the cabinets under the bathroom sinks, I found one or two small sponges, those little colored ones you can get at the dollar store at ten for a buck. I found some cleanser under the kitchen sink and set about cleaning. Well, I wore out a couple of those little sponges with all that cleaning, since they were cheap little things and were already used. Since they were flaking off sponge pieces and had rips in them, I tossed them in the garbage and got out a couple of new ones from the package I found under the kitchen sink. So my friend came home from her run to clean toilets and sinks, and fresh sponges.
It took her less than five minutes to notice the new sponge in the kitchen. Another bizarre reaction. She asked where the old sponge was. I said that I had used it to clean and it was worn out, so I threw it away. She got VERY snippy and said that I was being wasteful and that all I had to do was toss the sponge in the laundry and it would be fine. She started to reach into the damn garbage again. I had pretty much had it with this behavior at that point and told her that that sponge was worn out and flaking off sponge pieces. I told her it was a cheap sponge and that if she was worried about the cost I would buy her another one, but that I wasn’t going to try to wipe off counters with a disintegrating sponge. I think she must have realized at some level that she was being ridiculous, because she shut up and went out to the patio. Not wanting to repeat the same stupid scene when she saw new sponges in the bathrooms, I went into the bathrooms, retrieved the beat up sponges from the bathroom trash cans, and put them back on the sink (after disinfecting them again since they had been used to wipe floors and toilets). I put the new sponges under the sink where I could get them when I needed to wipe off the counter. All the while muttering under my breath that my friend had a mental problem.
I could continue with other stories of that trip, but the stories about schedule, food, sponges, and how my friend treats her friends when they don’t “behave” makes my point that under that effusive, fun-loving, generous exterior lies a controlling, anal personality with skin-deep generosity and some serious emotional/mental issues. Because I went home and told my husband about her strange behavior, he was a bit dubious when the offer to go to New Orleans happened. He reminded me of San Diego and asked if I could handle being around her for a long road trip. I told him that since I had managed to have fun on the San Diego trip and had kind of figured her out, I thought I could handle it.
I will continue with the New Orleans story in my next post.
Very weird. So apparently she never cooks, even at home, when she’s tired of snacks she goes out to eat. This is some of the strangest behavior. I used to eat out a lot when I was young and single. But I am always happy when someone even if they don’t have your culinary skills cooks for me. I really cannot fathom a person who wouldn’t allow someone else to cook for them.
It appears to me that the issue is not the food or other issues, but solely an issue of control. If you would have been opposed to cooking I think she would have been in favor of it. What do you think?
I know you’re giving the condensed version, but it really doesn’t sound like this visit could have been much fun. Of course we all try to minimize the negative and enjoy the positive in any event.
You hit the nail on the head when you said she has mental problems.
She definitely doesn’t cook, and her reaction to other people cooking is definitely a control issue. When she and her friend froze their butts off on their backpack trip along the Lost Coast, she finally succumbed to the idea that hot food is good, but that consisted of eating a couple of cup-o-noodles that they had brought along for backup. I think it was her friend who brought them. When I said I was bringing my camping stove on the road trip, she said she had learned her lesson about needing hot food sometimes, but she followed that with a comment about how we could get out some cup-o-noodles. I informed her I was bringing real food to cook whenever we camped. So what did she do when we camped in Arizona? Took me out for pizza, even though I said I would cook dinner. Mental is right.
One of the reasons I was especially looking forward to when we stopped for the night at my friend’s place in Texas was that he was going to cook catfish. Aside from the fact that I adore catfish, I was looking forward to a home-cooked meal that my friend couldn’t get out of, because she loved fish and it would be rude to turn it down. I was bummed when our screwed up schedule messed that up.
I would eat cup of noodles only if I was very very hungry. But what a weird thing to eat. Does she have some sort of eating disorder or only a cooking disorder. Catfish, hush puppies and collards. Really delicious. We love traveling in the motorhome because cooking is so convenient. We never have to eat out. We eat a lot of sushi and salad and stir fry.
Yeah, I’m not a cup of noodles fan either. Just a lot of salt. She is a vegetarian, but she eats seafood and doesn’t worry about the occasional chicken broth. I think it is a cooking issue of some sort, plus she is always watching her weight.
Thing is, I never realized any of this because I was her cook at field camp and I don’t remember her not eating.
I knew someone once who was a vegetarian but she didn’t focus on good quality natural food. So she would eat junk food as long as it contained no meat. I think basically she was always hungry. She periodically gorged on junk which created some sort of mental conflict. I don’t believe that a person is a vegetarian if they eat dead things no matter what they are. I think that killing cabbage is still killing something. So I think that a person should eat what they want as long as they are thankful for the food and do not waste what they have.