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Played

I've mentioned it a few times lately, but the Mild Girlfriend and I like to cook. This is a bit of a change for me, since I traditionally looked at cooking as a necessary evil. I always said that I could stave off starvation if left to my own devices, and that was good enough for me. That was always the plan, you know? Well, life has a funny way of throwing you curve balls.

At this point, I have a couple of dishes that I could make if pressed to bring something to a pot luck. Now, getting those dishes to the point where I wouldn't be ashamed to bring them has involved help from both the Mild Girlfriend and family, at times. Either way, I can actually make a dish or two on my own. I find this quite amusing in its own right, but that's not even close to where the story ends.

The Mild Girlfriend finds all of this just as amusing as I do, but she always points out that I should know how to cook things that I would happily eat. In particular, she goes one farther: she thinks that I should know how to cook the dishes I already like to eat. I'd never really heard it put in those terms, but it made sense to me. If I like lasagna, then being able to produce lasagna for myself makes a ton of sense. It's just another way of trying to maximize your happiness, really.

I've always happily gone along with this turn of events and this explanation, since it meant that I got to eat more lasagna (I'm pretty easy to please). And in general, the work I put in doesn't outweigh the benefits. All in all, it seems like a good deal.

However, we recently prepared chocolate covered strawberries. Remember, I'm the kind of person who likes his drinks to be half sweet. I don't really have much of a sweet tooth. While I will eat dessert, it's never really high on my priority list. I'm a social dessert eater, if you will. So, when we were prepping the chocolate to use in conjunction with the strawberries, I more or less figured out that this wasn't for my benefit. I didn't mind helping, and it's not like I griped. But still, it made me chuckle.

This train of thought got me thinking about any other dishes that may not have been for my benefit. As I started trawling through my memories, I did notice a few other examples of dishes in which  I didn't show a strong interest before we made them. Interestingly enough, the Mild Girlfriend did like these dishes and profess a strong interest in them before we made them. If we were to take the entire body of dishes that we'd cooked, she probably would have liked something very close to 100% of them. I still would have appreciated a very high percentage, but it would not have been 100%. My guess was that I was much closer to 80%.

That's when it hit me: I'd been played. The Mild Girlfriend said that I was learning to cook dishes I liked, but really, I was learning to cook dishes that she liked. There just so happened to be a big overlap between the two, but the percentages were not lost on me. I had never had that particular type of pancit that we made (side note: pancit canton is basically chow mein), nor had I expressed an overabundance of love for the adobo we made. Yet, those items still ended up on the menu.

When presented with my new theory, the Mild Girlfriend laughed, very heartily, and joked that her plan was working. Once the laughter died down, she offered up this tidbit: why in the heck would she and I cook things that we didn't like? Well, that's fair, but the percentages still skew in her favor. Like I said, I think I've been played. It's like the end of "The Usual Suspects," where they make the realization about Keyser Soze (there are spoilers for a 20 year old movie if you follow that link).

I lead a rough life, I tell you. I'm just going to have to keep cooking stuff, to try to even out the percentages just a little bit.

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