Oh, my God!

I freak out every time this happens.


Actually I'm instantaneously transported through the decades to the past at that spot when I totally freaked out about this the first time, when I was five years old and shown by my mother the eggs she opened into the pan. They're twins! This never fails to make me a little bit sad. I was aware then, at five years of age, the eggs would develop into chicks, if they were left alone by us and if they were fertilized, just as the fruit seeds I planted in dirt developed into plants, so I was aware then that by eating eggs I was destroying the potential for darling little chicks, and that can put a boy off eggs permanently. I contrive in my mind a farm scene where a hen is sitting on six eggs and then one day seven chicks appear as if by magic -- it's a bloody numerical miracle! -- another of the awesome and delightful mysteries of life. Slain.

Speaking of regret over being a baby chicken killer; by cracking open four eggs to whip out a batch of cupcakes, like yesterday, I'm admitting to myself of being a serial chicken-abortionist, and that makes me a little bit sad too. This happens every time I crack open an egg and especially happens whenever I crack open a number of eggs at once, and that transport to childhood happens automatically every time I open up a double-yolk egg. "They'd be twins!" My inner child yells inside from a long-distant past that is still quite present. Then the taint of remembered boyish sadness descends. Then I lift the emotional pall, deftly by practice, and turn to heat up some home-made green chili in the same pan the chicken pre-fetuses were fried, because what would a plate of aborted sadly unfertilized unusually doubled Gallus gallus domesticus ova be without green chili when it's already right there on hand in its little plastic container? Nothing, that's what. I have tortillas too, but they're frozen, and frankly, on chicken-miracle day I can not be bothered with thawing.

See how our big fat scientific selves obfuscate with language to assuage and to put a distance between the reality of what we're doing and the experiences of our precious littler emotional selves?