Google images because I can
inb4brokenlink in 2 months time
"Bacon, lettuce, tomato and pepperjack cheese", he said excitedly, biting into his self-made sandwich. I'd always been somewhat impressed with his sandwich-making abilities, but it wasn't until he said that that I started questioning what exactly makes a "good" sandwich? Did it make a difference that he'd chosen pepperjack cheese instead of some other kind? If not, why would he have specified what kind of cheese it was? I'd made sandwiches for him in the past, though I can't quite remember exactly what his feedback was at this moment, but he'd always think I was weird for putting certain combinations of things together between slices of bread. I grew this expectation of a "proper" framework for sandwich-making, which I suppose is kind of true -- for instance, bacon, lettuce and tomato do seem to go together quite well, but in my opinion the turkey-lettuce combo that the dining halls here offer can be majorly improved with a slice of cheese and a fried egg. A lot of people give me alien looks when I say I like to put eggs in my sandwiches.
"That's not what you're supposed to do," they say. But the more sandwiches I have made, the more I started to realize that though certain things are 'supposed' to universally go together, there's definitely no real rules to sandwich construction -- just because most people I've come across think I'm strange for putting eggs in my sandwiches doesn't mean I'm going to stop doing it anytime soon. Though, disclaimer here, I still don't have much of an idea of what to put in a sandwich given the ample choices of the ingredients bar here, and oftentimes I experiment with salad dressings on my salads and I'm pretty sure certain vinaigrettes that I use are not meant to be used with the things I put in my salads. However, this whole dining hall debacle has made me realize something bigger about the world, which is that nobody really knows what they're doing.
There are lots of 'accepted' rules about how we should do certain things, but there are just as many, if not more, ways to experiment with our own ways of doing things. Since I've always been a pretty logical person and tried to define everything in terms of rules and exceptions to those rules, it was a weird thing to realize growing up that not everything fits into boxes all the time.
The first time I bought something and it didn't work, I didn't know what to do with myself. It just seemed ridiculous that something professionally made could ever be imperfect. What's more, it started happening so often that I thought there was something wrong with the way I was doing things. I am still weirdly frustrated when things don't work because I don't know how to respond to the event. I am never quite sure whether I am doing something wrong or whether the thing I am using is actually just broken. For example, I am pretty sure that the fender that came with my bike over the summer actually just doesn't fit in the wheel, but I was also equally convinced that the rack didn't fit on either, but at the end of the summer I was able to work out how to attach the rack, so to this day I still have no idea whether the fender's inability to attach was my fault or the manufacturer's.
What complicates this whole ordeal is the fact that it's often positive to be creative and come up with better ways to solve problems that might be unconventional. However, I always second guess myself because I figure that if it were really a better way, surely someone else would have thought of it already, so the way that I thought of must be inefficient in some way since it's not widely accepted. I always get excited when I think of something and start doing things in a certain way, and then find someone else who does it in the same way, even though it's not conventional. I guess it's just confirmation that I'm not totally on the wrong track if someone else prefers it my way too.
I wish I had some moral here like people shouldn't be afraid to make up their own ways of doing things, because the world is not always going to provide a defined way for you, but I'm not really sure if that's the answer.
Being in college and growing up is kind of a weird time in my life. Though my ego likes to think I know all the answers, that's really not the case.
