the high price of humility

(or, "it's a good thing that the third time is a charm, especially when the first two are inequivocal disastrophes.")

yes, i feel stupid, and yes, this is pretty much a constant state of being for me.

last night markus had another movie night at his apartment, and i volunteered to come early and make pies. against my better judgement, i let him convince me that we should make several different kinds of pies. no good can come of this.

doing everything in parallel wasn't so bad (i'm surprised i was able to manage it at all), but the scheduling was way off. we made the filling and the meringue for the lemon one before the crust was ready, which meant that they were cold and fallen (respectively) by the time i assembled the pie. the end result was that the meringue was more elastic than usual, making it impossible to cut, and the filling separated, leaving a syrupy soup in the pie plate after cutting it.

i should have known something was horribly, horribly wrong when the filling for the key lime pie wasn't thickening like it was supposed to. i went ahead and put it in the shell anyway, and baked it. then, again, i should have seen the writing on the wall when the filling wasn't setting up in the oven; it was supposed to bake in 15 minutes, i left it in for nearly an hour before it seemed done. but no, even with these somewhat obvious telltale signs, i failed to see the problem until the very last moment, when i started slicing it, and tasted a little bit of the filling that stuck to the knife... what makes it worse is that i knew beforehand and even predicted that this might happen. i had substituted what i think was evaporated milk for sweetened-condensed milk, and forgot to sweeten it---there was no sugar at all in the pie. it was utterly terrifying. the taste was somewhere between plain yogurt and sour cream. i wanted to cry.

luckily, it's rather hard to fuck-up an apple pie, so the only thing wrong with that one was that it hadn't completely cooled by the time we cut it, so it leaked a bit, but no one is going to notice that.

so yeah, i got what was coming to me. i wanted to be a smartass and show off, and i collided head-on with the chrysler of karma. better luck next time, kids.