Today my coworker Brook came over to my cube and dropped a printout onto my desk. She proceeded to drop one on Mary’s desk and one on Ginger’s. I picked it up and read the first line aloud: “Award-Winning Chicken Rub Recipe.”

“What’s this for?” I inquired immediately.

“It’s a really good chicken rub recipe,” was her answer.

I got up from my desk and walked over to her and Ginger. “What do you want me to do with this?” I asked. Turns out, Brook was trying to be nice by offering up this fantastic recipe.

I’m sorry, have we met? Do you sit right next to me and listen to me blather on all day everyday about my life and everything related to me? Where from my incessant musings did you get “homemaker?” I mean in order to use chicken rub you’d need to make a chicken, I assume. My idea of dinner is a box of All Bran crackers and an episode of SVU. Sometimes I make a ham and cheese sandwich, and if I’m feeling really adventurous, I heat it up. But I don’t cook. I don’t bake. I don’t even feign interest in cooking or baking or doing anything with food that requires more than 6 minutes of my time.

I guess this is just the process of getting to know your coworkers. I learn that they puke whenever they see dog poop (yet for some reason still own a dog); they learn that I don’t cook – I just assemble.

So I decided that I’m going to start being more open to things that I currently hate, like dogs and Applebee’s and St. Paul. The other day my dad actually said that I’m a Minneapolis snob. This is entirely true. Whenever one of my friends moves to St. Paul, the question that immediately pops into my head is, WHY? I’ve never really understood why someone would want to live in a city that hardly has any nightlife and has streets that don’t go in numerical OR alphabetical order. I guess if you worked in St. Paul, maybe, but who works in St. Paul? Everyone I know who lives there works in Minneapolis or the suburbs, meaning they actually have to go out of their way to live in the more lame of the twin cities. Minneapolis, on the other hand, has loads more restaurants, bars, museums, theaters, coffeehouses, clubs and shops than St. Paul AND they all stay open past 5 p.m. But despite these blatantly valid reasons for disliking SP, I’m going to try not to hate on it anymore. I mean, I like a lot of people who live there, so that’s something. And there must be other good things about it. It’s our capital city. It’s got a lot of Irish bars. The Wild play there. And umm…Cossetta’s is a really good restaurant. Now Applebee’s and dogs, those are going to take some more work. But I’ll keep trying…cause I don’t want to be one of those people who hate stuff.