okay this story falls under the ‘sarah is bonkers & has to make everything she does way more difficult than it should be’ category of life decisions
so this happened when i was an undergrad, & i lived in an apartment with this other girl in the same town my parents live in, which was actually an ok setup because i could borrow their car & get free food without having to listen to my father snore or play james taylor’s christmas album. my mother belonged to this farming co-op thing where she’d get a bunch of weird ass veggies & stuff once a week from local farmers (& i grew up in arizona so like. sometimes it was weird shit). & i often got all the extra weird food my parents didnt want to bother cooking because i was a poor college student & didn’t complain about it.
so one week my mom picks up her veggie order & gets this giant monstrous spaghetti squash, its HUGE. my mother HATES spaghetti squash for whatever reason. hates it. naturally she offers to give it to me & i’m like ‘yeah ok sure’ & she’s all ‘sarah i can walk you through how to cook this but i don’t want it in my house i hate these things but tell me if you need help cooking this’ & i’m like ‘MOM i can cook a fucking squash it’s fine i’m 20 years old’
& i become VERY DETERMINED to cook this damn thing because my mother had implied that i didn’t know what i was doing & was helpless & just floundering my way through life. how cooking a giant evil orange oblong squash was gonna prove this i can’t tell you but that’s what i thought. i think i wanted to demonstrate that i was RESOURCEFUL and HEALTHY and ATE ADULT FOOD SHE DOESN’T LIKE.
naturally it was NOT FINE.
i bring the damn thing home & decide it’s too big to really do anything with so i’ll cut it open before i cook it because that’ll be easiest. i DID NOT read any directions on how to cook a spaghetti squash because i was determined to DO IT MYSELF LIKE AN ADULT WHO EATS SPAGHETTI SQUASH AND NEEDS NO HELP FROM NOBODY.
so i pretty quickly realize that i’m pretty unable to actually cut the squash open. it’s massive & has a thick rind & i can’t get a knife into it. i spend probably twenty minutes sitting on my kitchen floor with the squash in my lap trying to stab it with every knife in the kitchen & i can’t even get it fucking started. if i’d owned a fire ax i probably would’ve taken a fire ax to it. & naturally the situation evolves from simply a test of my adulting abilities to a TEST OF MY HONOR AND STRENGTH. I’VE GOT A 4.0 i tell myself I CAN OUTSMART A SQUASH but i can’t because i can’t cut it open. i have a bit of a meltdown at this point because my self worth, which is fragile & bewildering on a good day, is being torn to shreds by a stupid fucking orange gourd.
the logical thing to do at this point would have been to give up because i’m not all that wild about spaghetti squash anyway but i CANT ADMIT DEFEAT I HAVE TO OWN THIS STUPID MOTHERFUCKER!!!!!!
so i decide to stick the squash in a giant pot & boil it for a while until it gets soft enough to be cut open. brilliant. i’m a genius. i’m so pleased with myself. everyone in the entire world could have told me this was a bad idea. if i’d called my mother to ask for her help she would have probably had a heart attack but i didn’t do that because i’m DETERMINED TO WIN.
so i stick the damn thing in the biggest pot i have, put it on the stove, & feeling very pleased with myself go to take a nap because i’ve fought a battle that i am winning
my roommate gets home maybe an hour and a half later, drops her stuff off, sees me sleeping on the couch and walks into the kitchen. and naturally, as soon as she walks into the kitchen the vegetable bomb that i planted in a pot of boiling water on our stove goes the fuck off which is what happens when you put a large round semi-hollow object in a pot of very hot water so steam builds up inside and then forget about it. so roommate walks into the kitchen
and the squash TAKES FLIGHT.
because, surprise, when you let an incredible amount of steam build up inside something shaped like a bomb it will BURST A HOLE IN THE SIDE AND FLY INTO THE AIR LIKE A RED HOT GOURD PROJECTILE
it sounded kind of like someone firing a cannon in our living room so i wake up thinking someone is SHOOTING AT ME, vault over the couch screaming to see the squash launch out of the pot of water straight up into the air. it misses my roommate’s head by maybe a half a foot. she screams and i scream and we both hit the deck and the squash smacks into the ceiling and then to the ground, splattering squash insides all over us and the floor.
needless to say i had a lot of apologizing to do because i almost murdered her with dinner, & i then had to tell my mother that i’d completely failed in making my point about being mature & self sufficient, but had discovered that spaghetti squash work really great as weaponry if the situation ever arises.
i think she laughed at me for forty five minutes.
so there you go, that’s the story about how i almost accidentally committed squash bomb homicide