Fruitcake Rave IV

Demonic Toaster: 1

Pitiful Human Female: 0

After a week without having toast, I had had enough. My family's breakfast often consists of the western option: oatmeal, or the eastern option: juk, rice, kimchi (my brother once made the notorious raddish kimchi sandwich. Uhg. I still have nightmares), and whatever leftovers we may have in the fridge. I really don't understand kimchi in the morning

, but it must be one of those asian things that skipped me, because for as long as I can remember, my brother and mother have always been at one end of the table, chugging down their kimchi and juk, while I sit at the other, trying to concentrate on the pancakes and not breathe through my nose.

Don't get me wrong, Kimchi is great! (Insert Victory dance) It's the second staple of the Korean diet (The first being...take a wild guess...rice), and most of the time, the number one thing they miss about home. Kimchi has a great* flavor and a refreshing** odor, and after spending a month away from home, it was the only food I was craving. Kimchi in the morning however, well....

But I digress. You see, the main crux in my delima is the toaster. As I've mentioned before, my family can survive without a toaster. In fact, they would thrive without a toaster. And- I'm not exagerating- if you crept in at night and stole our toaster, they probably wouldn't notice. Thus, a total toaster breakdown didn't really rock anyone's world. Except for mine, because my breakfast nearly always consists of bread. With the occasional side of bread. The toaster breakdown signified a new epoch in my diet. I also lost a lot of weight (just kidding).

So one day, I decided I had had enough of the toaster's schenanigans. There wasn't really anything wrong with it, excepting the acrid smoke that wafted through the air whenever we used it. I used my brilliant (haha) brain and decided that smoke=somethingburning, so, f(toaster)=somethingburningX= breadcrumbs, and thus, the only natural thing to do to redeem my toast would be to clean out the toaster.

Cue horror music.

Ok, so I'm not the most brilliant girl who ever flipped eggs with a spatula, but I figured that I, being a resonably intelligent human being, and it being an inanimate hunk of metal and plastic, I could win this battle!

Who was I kidding? My stroke of genius that would decisively win the war consisted of unpluging the toaster and using wooden chopsticks instead of a metal fork (Like I have done previously. Now you know why I'm so loopy-- just kidding, I did use a metal fork, but it had a plastic handle, and luckily, Dad showed up in time to prevent permanent mental damage. I think.). The real battle was about to begin.

Ten minutes later, I was still struggling. The brilliant plan of using chopsticks to swab a paper towel around kept getting caught on all kinds of metal protrusions, and worse yet, the wet paper towel kept slipping from chopsticks, getting stuck underneath the funny grill like thing, and staying there. You see, the openings in the toaster are like, super thin, centimeter wide...that is, half inch wide, cracks of doom. Manuverability and Visibility hit a negative 7. If a passerby were to come along, they'd probably see this asian girl with leopard print glasses and cat slippers squinting at a toaster and ramming a bunch of chopsticks in it with as much delicacy as a neurosurgeon performing an operation with a sledgehammer. They would probably wish they were still dreaming.

Well, at any rate, I wished I was too.

So halfway into the fray, with half the toaster innard's cleaned out, I realize that, hey, if I can remove the breadcrumb tray, I should be able to penetrate the most vital part of the enemy's defenses! Attacking from the bottom would enable me to clear out those crusty, sticky black crumbs that I was barely able to reach from the top! I whipped out the crumb tray and flipped the crummy thing on the back, only to realize....

....That the equally diabolical manufacturers had added a plastic grill to prevent people from messing around.

Now seriously, that makes no sense. We already have a bread crumb tray-- a removable bread crumb tray at that-- so why in the world do we need to have a second breadcrumb tray that probably doesn't do its job well because there are holes in it?***

I mean, when you first think about it, it makes sense. Then you spend like, two more seconds thinking about it, and you realize, human intelligence is overrated. And yes, I'm not only referring to the crackpot creators of the toaster, I'm also referring to the equally crazy girl (me) who thought she could take on the toaster at 7:34 in the morning. I should have known better-- my brain doesn't start fully functioning until 9:00 (I have physical science 1st period at 8:00. Go figure) and even when it's functioning at top- notch quality, it's not much to brag about anyways. As numerous incidents would tell, but then again, I'm trying to salvage every shred of respect I can hold on to. Said incidents will follow me to my grave. Unless, of course, I get bored.

But I digress.

Then, I spied, to my infinite glee, the screw holes in that screwed up breadcrumb tray-- a way in past the line of defense! Elatedly, I rushed to the toolbox and grabbed every kind of screwdriver there was in the box. This was it-- the path to the perfect toast, I was so close...

...And yet so far.

You get the gist of this story: Pitiful human female is constantly outwitted at every turn by inanimate toaster. And the worst of it was, my emotions were oscillating between extreme despair and estatic euphoria. It was like I was on sugar or something (else) except I wasn't. (Now you know why all my friends avoid me while I'm hyper)

It figures perfectly that every single screwdriver I tried-- yes, every single screwdriver was too shallow to even reached the screwed screws! I'm serious, why would they even bother putting screws in that scr***d up thing if the average human (female teenage birdbrain) can't reach them? Unless... they figured the most natural reaction to seeing the screws would be a mistaken assumption that the battle would soon be won in my favor...

...thus setting the stage for the destructive return of my frustrated wrath, tenfold.

It was back to the usual tactic: keep messing around with the chopsticks and paper towel in hopes of somehow winning the battle before I would be obliged to enter the lunatic asylum.

Two days later...well, maybe 15 minutes...the b

attle was won, in some sorts. True, there were pockets of resistance, but the main body of scum had been flushed out. Of course, by then, my toast had thawed out, but as you know, toast isn't toast unless it's toasted. Thawing doesn't count. Then it's called bread, and tastes like marshmallows without sugar. Triumphantly, I plugged the malevolent malicious machiavellian !&*$^@ thing back in, popped in the toast and beat a hasty retreat to the table where I waited for my toast, in exhausted but euphoric anticipation.

A good ending to a probably boring story...

...except five seconds later, acrid smoke was flowing from the kitchen.

Whoever came up with the phrase "Demonic Toaster", in my humble opinion, should have used a few stronger adjectives.

This is Quiet Girl, eating her juk and kimchi placidly.

-Shhh...

*ly memorable. Let's leave it at that. If you're a Kimchi novice, you may or may not necessarily agree with me when I say Kimchi tastes good.

**again, depending on your background. In all honesty, it stinks up the room. But the most interesting thing is, if you're eating the Kimchi, you can't smell it. If you're not eating the Kimchi, you can smell it. From very far away.

***Which, incidentally, don't help one bit, because, aside from providing me a lovely vision of what I could accomplish if the breadcrumb tray was not there, it is also too small for me to get my chopsticks through. Seriously, I'm begining to think the designers are descended from at least one of Hade's Furies.