cottage cheese

An ex-girlfriend of mine once made cheese in our refrigerator. Bookish, she was exactly the sort of person you’d want stranded on a desert island with you to teach you all about compasses and wind currents and what it is you’d done to make her so angry just now. So the process of making cheese from a gallon of milk involved straining and I think some heating but it basically amounted to leaving milk in the refrigerator for several weeks past its out date. The result was a sort of crumbly chevre.

Since then I’ve been a lot more brave about dairy products. Coming in to work tonight I discovered that all I had to eat for the next six hours was a bag of xylose (the fat man’s trying to lose weight, I know, funny), five York peppermint patties (which I hate), and a tub of cottage cheese that had been knocking around the basket of my bike for a few days.

I am not by nature a gross person. I do not eat with my hands or burp in public, so it’s a little hard to admit that I have just now finished a pound of cottage cheese that expired five days ago and has, since that time, been kept at room temperature.

I’ve got a slight tingling on my tongue, and I’m wondering if the computer lab might be my last visual memory before a lifetime of blindness.

Still it’s better than York peppermint patties.