I love to cook. This comes as a suprise people who knew me “back in the day”, “the day” being an era when I found toast to be a challenge and once messed up a batch of ganja granola bars so badly I couldn’t GIVE them away, even to that cracked-out kid who wandered onto the porch and tried to sell my friend some ecstacy that bore a suspicious resemblance to Excedrin. I begged other people to scramble eggs for me, and “dinner”, more often than not, meant “olives out of a jar”.

I always did make a mean pancake, but that is neither here nor there.

In recent years I’ve been working on my culinary skills, and have gotten to the point where I gave out homemade chocolates for Christmas and prefer to make my tomato sauce from scratch. Last weekend, I decided to put my talent to the test by whipping up an impressive spread of finger foods for my sister’s 23rd birthday party. While everything came out nicely, I did have a small accident while dicing chives for the salmon dip. Luckily, after my years in food service, the sight of blood pouring from my fingertips doesn’t affect me very much. Even when it lasts for upwards of six hours. Even when I start to think that maybe stitches wouldn’t have been such a bad idea after all. Katsumi, of course, almost passed out, and for the next few days he wouldn’t let me pick up a knife.

But last night he wasn’t home, so I decided to make minestrone soup. I was happily sipping on some red wine, chopping away at the celery, carrots, potatoes and zucchini, stirring the stock and generally enjoying life, when, while executing a long, straight slice through a head of cabbage, the blade met my index finger in a most unfortunate way.

This was not at all like the chives wound. It was deeper and simultaneously more shallow, so that the tip of my pointer was opened sideways from the tip of my nail to nearly halfway across the pad. I grabbed a dishtowel, wrapped it around my finger, and tried not to pass out. I had no band-aids (I’d dropped them into the toilet the morning after the party), I couldn’t drive while maintaining pressure on the cut, and I’m currently in health-insurance limbo until my benefits guy gets back from his post-holiday vacation, so stitches were out of the question. One-handed, I texted Katsumi and asked him to buy first-aid materials and come home.

It took the rest of the bottle of wine to dull the incessant throbbing, and within an hour I’d bled through two sheets of gauze. Today I am typing with only nine fingers, which is actually a lot harder than it sounds, and I can’t put on hand lotion, which just absolutely fucking sucks.

Moral of the story: make damn sure you always have health insurance, because if I’d gone to the hospital I might have been able to get some pain meds. And stitches. Yeah, that too.

Also, unrelated, I am in love with these shoes. Who wants to buy them for me?