I Burnt Myself

I have a love/hate relationship with ovens...

Sure, they cook some of my meals (although I prefer cooking in a wok), but I'm also one of the clumsiest humans ever to walk this planet, so they're also a great source of pain to me.

I won't get into great detail as to why it's not safe to cook meals naked when you're a man - even if you're only using the stove top and a pan, the metal from the oven still stings and burns when your manhood makes contact - and will instead concentrate on my latest feat: burning a perfect rectangle on the inside of my left forearm.

I was making garlic and rosemary calamari, and BBQ-flavoured chicken strips; I'd already turned them over once and was pretty much ready to take them out of the oven when, as I bent over, my forearm must've touched the oven's door on the inside... the pain was instant and excruciating, but because I can handle most levels of hurt, I guess it didn't show at first.

The Lady Of The House seemed distraught when I walked to the freezer, grabbed some ice cubes and inquired where the plastic Ziploc bags were; her face let on that I was moving at too slow a pace to really be in pain which, it's true, could be misleading.

In any event, the food was terrific, much better than the movie we watched that night, Michael Bay's (apparently) Criterion Collection-worthy unrealistic bore The Rock. Yeah, like the U.S. Army's most-decorated general, three-time Vietnam touring, Gulf-war winning chief of military and a bunch of his closest associates-turned-guerrillas will fall to a lab rat and a single SIS agent who hasn't left his prison cell in 30 years... makes sense.

Then I spent the whole night applying cream to my wound rather than sleeping. Vitamins A and E, aloe, chamomile - three different kinds of cream to make sure it healed... but it didn't. 48 hours later, the perfect rectangle houses swelled skin that looks like a brain.

It stings now - rather than ache or burn - but it also feels like it's stretched-out, for some reason. But I'll survive. This, anyway.