Smokin'! And... Getting Hit On.

Forgive me, all. But I am about to relate to you an extremely silly story that quite demonstrates how very much I need to improve my observation skills. And it has to do with smoke.

This all happened last night (why is it that the funny things happen on Sunday?) while my roommate was attempting to Americanize some Japanese dish. I don't remember what they were called, but my best guess is nikamun, and I truly don't know what they are. The best I can do to describe them is like...deep fried (I suspect that's the Americanized part) meat eggrolls. Only not.

While Rachel, my roommate, was cooking the meat, Clifton (a guy from our ward) comes over and asks if we want to come over to his place for dinner in an hour. He thought he was too late, because he saw us cooking, but we said that we would go ahead and bring what we were making to the "family dinner" (because he and some of his roommates are in our family home evening group). He left us to finish cooking.

After the meat was done, Rachel started heating the oil, and then she, Hillary, and I started rolling the meat up in the dough. I was proud of mine, because I could make them so cute like little meat envelopes. I loved that mine had more aesthetic value than those of my roommates. While I was caught up in making these things so cute, and Rachel and Hillary were caught up in making them hold meat in the first place, we finally have the sense to realize that... it smells REALLY bad... and come to think about it, we can't really breathe very well either. Our attention captured, we look up in horror to see Rachel's pan of oil has heated up WAY too fast and is ejecting huge clouds of thick smoke into our once-breathable kitchen air. We kind of blink at each other and think something along the lines of Huh... that's not good.

Then came the idea that there is a smoke detector somewhere around here. While Rachel takes the pan off the heat, Hillary and I located the detector: right outside the kitchen in the hallway. We decide that since there isn't actually a fire, we don't want that going off and summoning the fire department. We hurriedly shut the kitchen-hallway door. Then we throw open the kitchen window, turn on the fan as loud and powerful as it can get, and then proceed to prop open the kitchen-outside door with chairs. At this point the air in our kitchen is not breathable. The three of us rush out the back door, down the stairs and onto the grass where the air is finally breathable.

At this point, the guy who invited us over had the misfortune of wondering if we were done yet. He calls Rochelle, one of our other roommates, who is safely shut in her room, which is farthest away from the kitchen. Since the kitchen door is shut, and I scientifically presume that the smoke would rather go out the windows and the back door than through the crack under the hallway door, and therefore assume she is safe. I did not take into account that she would get a call from Clifton and then come into the kitchen to track our progress.

According to Rochelle's account she unsuspectingly glides down the hallway, and finding the kitchen door shut, wonders, I wonder why the kitchen door is shut... it's never shut. Innocently she opens the kitchen door and -- "ARGGH!!!!!!" And she hangs up on Clifton.

She joins us down on the grass near our apartment, and we explain to her what happened. Just then, Clifton and one of his roommates, Jon, round the corner, and look bewildered to see our door propped open and expelling clouds of smoke and us sitting on the grass. This wasn't good, because we were hoping the boys wouldn't have found out.

By this time, Rachel decides that the air inside the kitchen is breathable, and goes off to put our toxic creations into the oven instead. The boys return to their apartment. Hillary and I cautiously follow her, discussing carbon monoxide poisoning and marveling about what sort of chemical reaction must have taken place in the oil for it to emit such vile smoke. We decide Rachel would die first if any of us died, so if Rachel collapsed, then we might call 911. Fortunately, we decide we are all healthy except for our sense of smell being scarred for life.

We eventually make it over to the guy's apartment with our toxic eggrolls, which apparently didn't taste so bad. The guys had pork chops and rice and salad and avocados and... juice? Huh. So we sat there laughing at each other, and then Clifton brings up movies. Last week he was mumbling to me about something to with Facebook and movies in class when he wasn't supposed to be talking, and at my expressed confusion, he gave up. he clarified at this dinner. Apparently, according to Facebook's movie application, we pretty much like all the same movies. It said we were a 82% match, which is practically impossible. I didn't really care, but he seemed excited. So the whole table gets into a discussion about what movies we like the most. I say, "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" and get great approval from the both guys and girls.

The subject turns slightly to favorite Disney movies. All the people who go before me say the ones I really like, such as Emperor's New Groove, Lion King, Finding Nemo, etc. So... for something new, I say something like, "I really like Beauty and the Beast... because I practically am Belle." Unfortunately, this results in a creepy comment from Clifton: "Well, I'm Beast!" And Rachel, bless her, blurts out, "AWKWARD!" I give her an approving look, and the subject changes.

Well, there's this roommate of Clifton's (Jonathan) who is EXTREMELY quiet, but extremely nice and polite, and his family is Peruvian. I'm sitting next to him, and when we start talking about music I say I like full orchestral music especially (as well as practically everything else). We exchange a few words and next thing I know he is asking me on a date. Ooh... smooth, quiet man. Strike when the rest of the people there are completely ignoring you except for me. I think he's taking me to see some Minerva Teichart at the Museum of Art and then to dinner tomorrow. I can't be completely sure about what he was saying because he was so soft-spoken.

All of us play a few games (except for Jon, who decides instead to scour the kitchen and table clean instead). Jon lets me have all the leftover rice. Then we head home.

We get home, and upon informing my roommates of this date, they immediately turn into teasing mode. They decide instead of having a marital status board (which originally listed us all as single, but then morphed into sillier things... i.e. arranged marriage to mystery Tibetan man... then dumping the mystery Tibetan man for the cardboard man in Hillary's closet...), that we should have a date tally. They continue to tease me about having two dates in one week. Yes, two. I have another one. On Friday. With Ryan. Who happened to be the one that made my entire apartment brownies and left them at our doorstep. Yes, that was him. We are going to see pirates on Friday.

And this is slightly disturbing to me, because I've only been on one date before this, and I am not used to getting hit on. At all. It's like... whoa, guys like me? And I have more dates than any of the other girls already? Dang it. Staying single is going be a lot more difficult than I thought it was going to be. Especially since I just found out Jon is pretty much the only RM in our entire ward. Oops.