(Don’t forget to vote on next week’s topics at the end!)
At the start of each Pokemon video game, the player is given a choice between three starter Pokemon. Typically, all three are the only one of their kind, and so no matter which one is picked, the other two will never be available in the game. The decision can have huge impacts on how you play. Depending on which one you pick, certain parts of the game will be easier and others might be more difficult. It is precisely the kind of choice that a certain ten year old can doubt and regret and overthink - over and over again.
By now, I probably have the first hours of the original Pokemon games almost memorized. This is because I replayed them many, many times. I could never shake the feeling that in that original choice between the three starters, I chose wrong. So I started over and tried again. Then I second-guessed my second guess and started over another time. And so on. I wonder how many total weeks of my childhood and adolescence I spent playing just the repeated beginnings of these games. I think if my obsession had been almost anything else, I would be a better person today: imagine a child spending that much time learning about politics, science, or maybe even cooking.
A few weeks ago, I undertook the baking of a simple cherry cobbler from a recipe. It had four ingredients and a single direction. I managed to botch the job spectacularly before I even got to step one. The recipe calls for melted butter, and I thought (not unreasonably) that I might achieve this by placing solid butter in the microwave for a minute or two as I attended to the other ingredients. Apparently that was a miscalculation. Pretty soon, every wall, floor, and ceiling of the microwave was covered in exploded butter.
Apart from this recent incident, I’m not a bad cook these days. However, the first time I made spaghetti, I didn’t think to push the noodles in further than their original submersion, which resulted in being cooked up to about ⅔ up each strand, while the ends remained pretty brittle and stuck together. Out of college, I burned onions. I messed up some fried rice. Apparently, I had numerous incidents attempting to nourish myself during this time period...
In a video game, and in cooking, and sometimes even in life, you make a mistake. And while I think it’s natural to go back over it again and again trying to think of how it could have gone better, I’m trying to learn when to start over and when to savor the disaster. When I exploded my first stick of butter, it was easy enough to clean up and restart with a new one, and in the end that cobbler turned out fine. When I undercooked the ends of my spaghetti, I just drenched it in Prego and honestly it was fine, too.
We are never going to learn who Adam Segal would have been if I had made any choice differently: if I had chosen different friendships, if I had gone to different schools, if I had stayed in this or that job for a few more months, or if I had spent massive formative time and energy doing almost anything other than endlessly circling the grass patch in SE Viridian Forest in search of Pikachu.
I think life is a half-cooked spaghetti situation: you season your regrets the best you can until you can manage to swallow them and move on. And next time, maybe it will come out better.
Moving forward, I made a couple changes to the voting so that hopefully everyone can only vote once. Also you can give me feedback if you feel so inclined! I’m happy to write about any topic that truly is popular (even if I don’t know much about it) but I want to make sure it’s not just someone revoting a bunch of times. Last week’s results: