I Suc at Home Ec

by Mike Covers

Several years ago, my friend Bill and I were doing what every mid-30-something male does when he gets a bit of free time: wandering around Target. This was because we were in the suburbs, an area where Bill, I, and the rest of our friends spent most of our lives perfecting the art of aimlessly wandering around department stores, malls, each other’s homes, etc. Sure, we could have used that time doing things like, I don’t know, sharpening our social skills, but that seemed like an utter waste of our energy. Besides, sharpening social skills only brings you into the proximity of people, as opposed to something far more enjoyable, like a video game store. Had we been in a more stimulating environment, like New York City, we would have engaged in a far more exciting activity, like wandering around the Manhattan Target.

Suddenly, Bill unexpectedly shared something with me: a suggestion for steak preparation.

“What you want to do is marinade your steak in this,” he said, pointing to a random bottle on the shelf. “Do that overnight and then cook it. It will taste awesome.”

I felt sick to my stomach, and it wasn’t (only) because Bill’s choice of marinade sauce was partially composed of anchovy flavor. It dawned on me what was happening: Bill and I were standing in Target, in suburbia, discussing dinner preparation methods. Wasn’t it just the previous week that we each paid $25 to play laser tag for 8 straight hours in the middle of the night? Or was that seriously a decade and a half prior to that point?

The entire scenario further cemented the fact that adulthood was not only upon us, but it had been there for some time. While this didn’t seem to faze Bill at all, who had racked up serious adulthood points by acquiring a wife, child, house, and steak marinade preference, I on the other hand felt ill-prepared. I was only a few months away from Bill in age, but I still routinely pumped quarters into the X-Men arcade machine at the comic shop. My girlfriend Stephanie and I munch on dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets while taking in the latest episode of South Park. Most importantly, I STILL DO NOT MARINATE MY STEAK.

I credit my ill-preparedness for adulthood to my horrible experiences in shop and home economics classes in middle school. Well, maybe the teachers or the coursework weren’t specifically to blame; maybe I just plain didn’t have these skills at all.

Since I went to middle school in the early 1990s, back when gender norms were still a thing, shop class was viewed as the “boys'” class while home ec was viewed as the “girls'” class. Nevertheless, all of us had to take both classes each year.

Since I am male, I should have excelled at shop class, right? After all, didn’t I come out of the womb fully versed in manual dexterity and possessing an inherent knowledge of power tools and automobile transmissions?

Not quite.

Even though I do indeed possess the proper anatomical parts, I have never really been that good at being the stereotypical male, the one defined by popular documentaries of the time like “Home Improvement” with Tim Allen. I never took an interest in sports, cheap beer, and the patriarchy in general. Thus, shop class wasn’t exactly going to go swimmingly for me.

Shop was taught by Mr. Kibby, a Jeff-Foxworthy-resembling guy who wore a prosthetic leg. Rumor had it that he would entertain classes by taking the leg off and letting students throw darts at it, but I personally never witnessed this. Which is OK, since I also sucked at darts. 

Grades for my projects never exceeded C+ or B- territory, and I think Mr. Kibby was being amazingly generous with those marks. I made a “chair” that turned out to be such an abomination that I have to enclose “chair” in quotes to adequately describe it. The sorry excuse for furniture that I made was not only wobbly, but also suffered from an irreversible cut I made in the wood during construction. As a result, the back of the chair was smaller than its legs. Bar stools have more of a back than this chair did. When I brought it home, the only things that were allowed to sit in it were decorations. 

And let’s not forget about the “magazine rack” I somehow created, which was about as even as an Etch-a-Sketch drawing done by Michael J. Fox. One end of the rack could comfortably fit, for example, a World Atlas, but the other end was just wide enough for a bookmark. I’m pretty sure it is the only magazine rack in existence with its own built-in vanishing point. People may claim that the Internet and declining comprehension skills killed traditional magazines, but I feel that my 6th grade shop class magazine rack had a lot to do with it as well; the future for magazine storage did NOT look bright if my pithy excuse for a rack was any indication and, as a result, physical magazines were slowly phased out until nothing was left but subscription fees.

Since shop class was an epic failure on my part, proving that I would never excel at carpentry or being Amish, the process of elimination stated that home ec would be different. Right?

Again, not quite.

Home ec was taught by Mrs. Sirkin, a permed middle-aged woman with little to no personality but both of her original legs. It was taught in a mixed-use classroom that had a few sewing machines but no kitchen appliances, thus removing any cooking lessons that may have been part of the curriculum. Perhaps the local fire department heard that I would be starting the class soon and quickly carted out the ovens, stoves, sinks, etc. so that I wouldn’t singlehandedly turn the school into charred remains. Which I almost certainly would have, and not even intentionally (that desire would later come in high school, but that’s a different story).

As a result of our limited resources, sewing was basically all we did in home ec. Mrs. Sirkin took this lesson terrifyingly seriously, in that she actually spent an entire class period showing us a HOME VIDEO of HERSELF as she stitched together something. Needless to say, this video had all of the educational value of a blade of grass, but was far less interesting. I understand that hospitals now use this video to sedate patients for surgery.

Our first project was to sew a stuffed animal, which greatly interested me. I was into Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles at the time and was trying to collect an entire plush set of them. Unfortunately, the only method of obtaining them back then was to win them from the crooked skill games that lined the planks of the New Jersey shore boardwalk. And–surprise!–I sucked at those too. For years, my “Heroes on the Half-Shell” team consisted of a plush Raphaeld had to win for me. But the stuffed animal home ec assignment made me realize that maybe I have a second option! Maybe I could MAKE my own plush Ninja Turtles!

I did not want to bite off more than I could chew at first. After all, with its arms, shell, weapons, etc., a Ninja Turtle plush is a rather complicated project. To get familiar with plush construction, I tried my hand at sewing together a whale. It’s a good thing that the movie Free Willy was gaining traction around this time, as the pathetic-looking whale in that movie successfully distracted America’s attention away from my own pathetic-looking stuffed whale, which looked like plushie roadkill. Cotton stuffing leaked from its seams like mayo out of a chicken sandwich. It was a bugger disaster than Free Willy 3: The Rescue.

This did not deter me from attempting to make my own plushie Ninja Turtle. I naively convinced myself that my true talent laid in the construction of plush mutant turtles, not plush sea life. On the day that I decided to breathe life into the first of my turtles, Leonardo, I cut up an old green T-shirt of mine that would act as his skin. Then, I grabbed some cotton balls from the bathroom cabinet and my mom’s sewing kit and set to work. Unfortunately, Leonardo didn’t turn out much better than his lame whale cousin, which itself had been proudly displayed in our kitchen trash can, far from the refrigerator door of accomplishments and state magnets. In the old Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoons from the 1980s, Shredder often threatens that he will turn the turtles into “turtle soup” with his death ray of the week. The Leonardo that I stitched (and, on some corners, STAPLED) together resembled what Shredder’s threat may have looked like once it had been carried out. He looked nothing like his brother Raphael, who was of course put together by highly skilled Taiwanese laborers earning eight cents per hour.

When Mrs. Sirkin trusted us enough to start using the sewing machines, we were instructed to make shirts. I figured that this would be easier; unlike stuffed animals, which had all sorts of curves and stuffing materials and googly eyes, a shirt basically had to be flat. Even blind amputees could probably make a shirt. Thus, I certainly could.

Yet again…not quite.

My friend Thom, who was in the exact same class I was, made a very nice-looking striped shirt that I actually saw him wear on several occasions outside of class. The gray sweatshirt that I decided to make somehow had, thanks to my unique sewing machine handling skills, a sleeve on the FRONT. Seriously. The only way I could have worn that shirt would have been if I was in a disfiguring car accident that had permanently dislocated my left arm. Yet another C+ made its way onto the report card.

And yet, years and years later, Bill thought I could handle STEAK.