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Despite being hopelessly inept at the kitchen, I found myself at the Center for the Culinary Arts’ Kitchen Discovery Class (KDC) last Friday. The KDC is a six-hour introductory class where you get to cook and bake in a commercial kitchen and figure out which one you’re better at. Not that I need a class to discover that I suck at cooking but I’m all for throwing myself into all sorts of odd situations and learning from them, even when I already have a general idea of how they’ll turn out.

What I ended up discovering at the KDC is not so much any hidden cooking skillz0rz (I seriously don’t have any) as little revelations about myself. I had several of them during the course of six hours:

I’m not a food person.

I don’t have much of an appetite to begin with, and I’m not at all prissy about where my food comes from or how it’s prepared. I rarely ever eat at expensive, trendy restaurants because I’m a total cheapskate - it feels like a waste to spend over 300 bucks on something I’m just going to crap out the next day. Perhaps my lack of culinary appreciation is why I’ve shown little or no interest in cooking the proper way. As far as making my own meals is concerned, cooking should only involve three ingredients: canned food, a can opener, and a microwave oven.

Of course, I kept all those things to myself during the class. Why? Because the chef instructor was absolutely dreamy and I didn’t want to be the only unsophisticated, uncivilized, unappreciative-of-food lout in the room. I hope it wasn’t obvious that I was inwardly freaking out when I glanced at the handout and saw that we were to make caramelized salmon with orange-shoyu glaze, served sauteed mixed vegetables, soba noodles, lemongrass beurre blanc, and balsamic soy reduction. I’m told that I have a very expressive face.

Seriously though, since when did cooking get so complicated? I missed my can opener already.

I like being alone in the kitchen.

In a commercial kitchen, you have to learn to work with other people and make do whatever utensils are available. Making do with resources is easy enough for me, but please don’t make me work with other people - at least, not in a kitchen anyway. I don’t have anything against my classmates, but have you ever tried chopping vegetables with someone hovering over your back? It feels a lot like someone peering at your screen when you’re writing - unnerving, distracting, and downright irritating. Not to mention that a kitchen is already suffocating enough without fourteen people sharing the same small space with you and taking the ingredients right when you need them. I don’t care if I don’t know my ass from my elbow in the kitchen. I like figuring out the recipe and preparing all the ingredients all by myself.

Clearly I’m not going to be a commercial chef anytime in the near future.

If I can’t pronounce it, I sure as hell can’t cook it.

My groupmates asked me to do one simple thing: make the lemongrass beurre blanc sauce for the salmon. It involves throwing a bunch of ingredients together and putting them over a fire - nothing too difficult, even if my cooking experience doesn’t amount to much.

Naturally, I ended up burning the sauce. Don’t ask me how that happened. One minute, it was cooking quite nicely; when it checked up on it again, it turned into this black crusty thing at the bottom of the pan. I blame it on the fact that the sauce contained fancy French words I couldn’t pronounce.

I was hoping that Chef McDreamy wouldn’t chew me out when I sheepishly owned up to burning the sauce. To my surprise, he commended me for my honesty. Most students, he said, would have lied and said that they put the beurre blanc sauce somewhere in there. I wanted to impress him with my wit and intellect by saying something about how lying takes too much effort and that the world would be a far better place if everyone just said what was on their minds, but he moved on to the next group before I could even open my mouth. Damnit.

I’m pretty damn good at making desserts.

There is one thing I’m fairly good at in the kitchen though: baking. Besides the warm childhood memories I associate with raw cookie batter and the scent of bread in the oven, I love the exact, almost-ritualistic rhythm of the baking process. During the afternoon baking session, I insisted that I make the saffron panna cotta - which I did with absolutely no difficulty. I even shaped the almond tuiles that we used to garnish the panna cotta. Of course it took my groupmates and I four times to make the caramel sauce because the damn thing kept burning in the pan. The end result, however, was kick-ass, restaurant-quality panna cotta that tasted just as good as it looked.

I still suck at making sauces, but it’s good to know that there’s one kitchen-y thing I can do right and that I actually enjoy.

The Kitchen Discovery Class is a 6-hour class that takes place every Friday. If you’d like to try it out, call way ahead of time because there’s only a limited number of slots per class. For more information on the Kitchen Discovery Class and other courses, visit the CCA website.

Which would you rather be:

a) pretty but constantly depressed (and I’m not talking about the “I’m sad” kind of depression. I mean the sort where you spend hours either crying your eyes out for absolutely no reason at all, or staring into space because you honestly don’t care whether you live or die the next minute) and picking stupid fights with your boyfriend just because you can?

or

b) not-so-pretty, but at least you’re capable of being as happy as a mentally unstable 22 year old can get?

Believe me, this is not an easy question to answer.

I’ve been taking this birth control pill Yasmin for some time now, not so much for the “I’m too young to get knocked up” reasons as the “my skin has been ugly ever since I hit puberty and I’ve done everything to make my skin stop breaking out and for just once in my life I’d like to be pretty” reasons. My mom wasn’t too thrilled about my decision to get on the pill due to our family’s history of breast cancer. She was convinced that the estrogen in the pill would transform my breasts into little tumor farms. To appease her I had my gynecologist run some (rather expensive) tests on me and when everything checked out okay, I made my way to the drug store with my prescription of Yasmin.

Little did my mom or I realize that breast cancer is the least of the more serious side effects to get worried about.

Over the next couple of weeks, not only did my skin do a wonderful job of clearing up - I debunked the myth that the pill fattens you up like crazy. The other positive side effect I got from the pill is that it took my appetite to a place far far away and made me almost skinny like a model. For about two weeks I couldn’t bring myself to eat more than a couple of mouthfuls during every meal, no matter how delicious the food in front of me was. It even came to a point where the only reason why I bothered eating was to make the grumbling noises in my tummy stop. Every time I went out my friends, the first thing they’d tell me was that I looked prettier and skinnier than the last time they saw me. That made me feel damn good - but not good enough to make up for the huge waves of depression that kept hitting me once I started taking the pill.

It started out as me being ten times more cranky and sensitive than I usually am. Random little things that wouldn’t normally have bothered me, like getting lost in a strange city, became disasters of epic proportions - and I would deal with it all like some helpless heroine. (If you had gone with us to Cebu and Bohol, I bet you would have insisted on leaving me on the roadside. I would have done that, if I were another person.) When Ale left the Philippines I cried for hours everyday, but I wasn’t too worried since that was obviously normal reaction. However, the depression didn’t go away once we settled back into our familiar, comfy, long-distance routine. In fact, it got even worse. One minute I’d be okay and the next, I’d either be crying for no reason or picking a fight with Ale for some ridiculous reason or another. Like he’d make some offhand comment that wouldn’t have bothered me on a normal day, but because it’s been a while since I had a normal day I’d end up blowing things completely out of proportion. Really, with the way I’ve been acting up the past few weeks, I’m surprised I’m not single yet.

I can’t decide which is the worst part though - the moments where I’d be staring off into space feeling numb and empty because I pretty much lost the will to do anything (except stay in bed and watch Dexter or Grey’s Anatomy for hours), or the unexplained crying fits like the one I had last night. What frightened me about that episode is that it wasn’t just any kind of crying. It’s the way women cry when they’ve just been dumped or when someone they love has died, except I haven’t been dumped and no one I know died recently. For over an hour, my bed was practically shaking because I was sobbing so hard. I tried to calm myself down and figure out why I was freaking out so badly, but that made me cry even harder because I couldn’t come up with one good reason for that heavy, profound sadness. I wish I could attribute the mood drop to yesterday being my brother’s death anniversary, but that wasn’t even it. I had a similar crying fit just a few days ago, and it was just as unexpected and unexplainable as last night’s.

Getting depressed or crying for no reason is nothing new to me, but it’s never happened this frequently nor this intensely. I did some poking around the internet and discovered that the progestin component in Yasmin (or any other combination birth control pill) wreaks havoc on your serotonin levels by increasing a brain enzyme that inhibits the production serotonin. Serotonin is that neurotransmitter in your brain that affects your mood. If you have too little, you’re probably depressive and not much fun like I am. If you have too much, you’re probably one of those irritatingly chipper people who deserve a bullet in between their eyes. So I guess when you already have too little serotonin to begin with, and you take a pill that kind of kills what little serotonin you already have - it’s amazing I haven’t tried to kill myself yet.

Despite the wonderful things the pill has done to my physical appearance, I stopped taking Yasmin last Sunday. Being prettier and skinnier doesn’t mean anything when I can no longer appreciate the simple fact that I’m alive. Hell, these days it takes a Herculean amount of effort go out and show the world that I’ve gotten prettier and skinnier. I’m a little worried that my mood hasn’t improved yet, but I guess I’ll see how I’m like over the next couple of days.

So have any of you ever tried taking the pill or know someone who did, and had a reaction as bad as mine? How did you or that person deal with it? And do you think I should stop taking the pill, or take it with a combination of serotonin supplements? Really, I should be asking my gyno all these questions instead of consulting random Internet doctors. Unfortunately, her waiting room is always filled with pregnant women, screaming babies, and (for some reason) nuns, and I don’t really feel like surrounding myself with a lot of estrogen right now.

When Ale finally left for Italy, I thought the hardest part would be falling asleep at night. I was wrong. It’s waking up in the morning that gets so unbearably lonely.

I’ve never been a morning person. I love sleeping in, and anyone in my family or anyone I’ve traveled with can attest to the fact that I’m always last to wake up. I don’t know why but during the two weeks we were together I’d wake up an hour before he does and just sit there, watching him sleep. I’d be thinking too much as usual, about random disconnected things, and I’d come up with some minor revelation about life, myself, or us, and I’d want to talk to him about it. But he looks so peaceful sleeping there, like a little boy, so I remain seated and quiet, watching him. When I feel like the thought bubble is about to burst I start waking him up slowly. I’d crawl back to bed and wrap my arms around his waist and start shaking him gently. “Panda, Panda, Panda,” I’d whisper into his ear. He’d groan, wrap his arms around my neck, and bury my face into his chest to make me shut up. I’d pull away and repeat, until he finally opens his eyes and smiles (even though I know deep down he wants to kill me for not letting him sleep half an hour longer).

I love the way he looks at me in the morning.

These days all I have when I wake up is a pillow underneath my arm, my other hand clutching on to the t-shirt he’d sleep in, which I keep under my head.

I know that this isn’t a gone-forever thing, like death or a break-up. I know I should be happy because the two weeks we had was more than amazing. But then I start remembering all the stuff we did together - hanging out with my friends, riding jeepneys, me playing guitar onstage with him watching from the front row, swimming in the ocean, roaring through the Bohol countryside on a motorcycle, getting lost in Cebu. I remember how excited I was when I went with Anne and Bim to pick him up at the airport very early on Sunday morning, and how Bim wouldn’t stop making fun of me for being so excited and how embarrassed that made me feel - but in a very good way. I remember all these things and I get so so sad, because it feels like I’ll never be that happy again. There are times when it’s okay, when we talk on iChat like how it started, and I feel like I’m not going to shed another tear until I see him later this year. And then there times, such as now, when it occurs to me that there’s nobody who’ll make silly faces at me to calm me down when I start freaking out or nobody to tell me to eat my vegetables at dinner. And thinking that makes me so sad, the only thing I can do is cry to the songs that remind me of him while inhaling the scent of his aftershave (that he accidentally left). I can’t even begin to describe how happy I was when he was here, and how fucking lonely it gets now that he isn’t physically around.

I wish there was someone I could talk to about this. I mean I’ve told my friends how sad I get and although they’re probably tired of hearing about it, I don’t think they’d tell me to shut up. But I haven’t even begun to describe to them how lonely it really gets. Nobody is around during the worst part, in the mornings, when my chest gets so heavy with sadness and the only thing I can do to feel lighter somehow is smoke myself to death in the bathroom and cry until my eyes are swollen for the rest of the day.

Well, I suppose that’s what blogs are for.