Double Feature #5: Doin' it right, everybody will be dancing...
The internet's (and my own) obsession with doing things "the right way"
Lately I’ve noticed that a good deal of my non-social-media internet usage is spent looking up how to do things the right way. It’s become an unhealthy obsession of mine, and I only began to understand the scope of my problem when I found myself spending several minutes googling the proper way to reheat different kinds of food every time I warmed up leftovers. And this past week being the week after Thanksgiving, I spent a lot of time warming up leftovers.
In an effort to place the blame somewhere besides myself, I am going to say this is the internet’s fault. The internet is obsessed with optimization. On one side, there are “life hacks,” which are bizarrely stupid ways to optimize one’s life for a puzzling sort of efficiency. For instance, this one I pulled from a BuzzFeed list:
I’m pretty sure no one really does life hacks like this. I think they mainly exist to get retweets/upvotes and then to eventually be aggregated in listicles that appear as ads at the bottom of more legitimate online articles, with thumbnails like the one above and headlines promising to teach “One Weird Trick,” etc.
The other kind of online optimization has a more hipster craftsman bent. And unfortunately, those are the traps I get caught in all the time. This form of optimization promises that only a few more hours of work or a few more dollars spent will take your project (and by extension, your life) to the next level. My food reheating obsession is this kind of thinking trickling down into paces where it really doesn’t need to be. I must learn the Best way to reheat my food because then it will taste the Best and then my life will be the Best.
Over the past few years, I’ve engaged in light hobby tourism, bouncing around, teaching myself new skills through countless deep dive YouTube tutorials, niche subreddits, and ancient forum threads. I’ve taught myself to bake bread, cook, modify old Game Boy hardware, and skateboard. In order to write this newsletter, I had to peel myself away from doing research on building a gaming PC.
Learning a new skill is genuinely thrilling. It’s exciting for me to do the research to find the “right” way to do something new, practice it, and watch myself get better. I’ve gone from my greatest baking achievement being a boxed cake mix to regularly baking loaves of bread that I’m really proud of. I took an old Game Boy Advance and swapped out the screen for a modern one with a backlight, so I can play the games I grew up with without making my eyesight even worse than it already is. I made a whole Thanksgiving dinner last week. I kinda learned to ollie!
It’s a feeling that I don’t get from my job as a production assistant, which is a string of menial tasks that I never see the end result of. I think that’s partly where my obsession with finding the Best Way To Do Things comes from: a desire to make my time away from work as perfect as it can be. If work is going to feel meaningless, then my free time must be stuffed with as much meaning as possible. I just need to learn where to draw the line so I don’t try to derive meaning from leftovers.
Because I’ve already wasted far too much of my life googling how to do this stuff, here are all my “one weird trick” leftovers techniques.
Pizza: Heat a pan on the stove over medium high. Put your slice of pizza in the pan for a few minutes. Then add about a tablespoon of water to the pan (away from the pizza). Cover the pan, wait for the water to stop sizzling, about a minute, until cheese is melted.
Pasta: Heat a pan on the stove over medium high. Add about a tablespoon or so of olive oil and some minced garlic (go wild with like 2 cloves if you love garlic, chill out with half a clove if you want it more mellow). When garlic is aromatic, add your leftover pasta. Stir around until warmed.
Thanksgiving Food: Honestly, your leftovers have probably gone bad, please don’t reheat them. But I was doing mashed potatoes/gravy in the microwave for 30 seconds and most everything else (I did chicken, stuffing, and brussels sprouts) goes in a pan with a bit of butter. Put all of it between two slices of lightly toasted bread, add cranberry sauce, eat.
Coffee: I’ve looked this up several times, each time hoping I’d find a different answer, but apparently the best way to reheat coffee is on the stove. That’s so dumb. I will just have my coffee over ice or microwave it rather than waiting for it to heat up on the stove. This is one where I’m happy to do it wrong.
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The art at the top is by Isaac Benavidez. Follow him on Instagram: @bienvenidez
Follow me on Twitter to watch me get distracted in real time: @reidoconor