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Let’s put a positive spin on this, since people in the comments are dogging on him enough.
Guy’s 20, living on his own, clearly inexperienced in the ways of living on his own, and he had the courage to do what so many fail to: ask for help. If he keeps that going, he’ll be fine.
He clearly didn’t get the guidance he needed when he was younger, but he is trying and asking questions. He is on the right path.
People like to blame men for the failure/neglect of society, parents, teachers, etc., to teach them the things they’ll need to know as an adult. Generally regarding stuff that was conventionally ascribed as “women’s duties”: cooking, cleaning, decorating, etc.
People blame the individuals as if they’re supporting the patriarchy by not knowing the things that they were never taught. That’s missing the point, because these men were harmed by the patriarchy which neglected to teach them these important things.
It’s really hard to enter your twenties and become moderately independent and suddenly have to learn a hundred different things that are absolutely critical to a well-ordered life, that already come so naturally to people who have been doing it their entire lives that they hardly even think about it and look down on you for not just intuitively grasping everything you need to know.
But no, they see a young guy struggling with basic tasks like washing the bed sheets or hanging curtains or choosing a tasteful rug or not burning dinner or whatever, and they jump straight to “NOBODY IS GOING TO MOMMY YOU, GROW TF UP!!!” Because it’s sooo cool to attack a man who you find in a position of weakness because he’s struggling with tasks you deem basic.
If we could just break that stigma and make it okay for men to ask for help, they’d be able to learn what they need to a lot easier. At least the ones who try. Clearly the ones who don’t try and have no interest in trying are the problem, so why focus the ire on the ones who do try? Asking for help kinda skylines yourself and makes you vulnerable to attack, so I’m not surprised few people do it.
That would at least ease the transition for a generation or two until people who learn basic things as boys grow up and become men who don’t need to catch up on the things that the average 20yo woman has already been doing for over a decade…
Also of note, some of that can just be pure crippling ADHD too,
washing the bed sheets
Thanks for reminding me.
hanging curtains
Bought 'em 2y ago and they’re still in the box in a seldom used closet, keep forgetting about them until I see them but then I’m doing something and will have to get to it later, by “later” I’ve forgotten again. I’ll get to them later…
choosing a tasteful rug
This one might not be ADHD I just hate shopping for things, I get in and get out.
not burning dinner
OH SHIT MY PIZZA!
Many, many years ago I did one of these. I made sure to take pictures, because at least some of the shots looked good enough to make up for the sadness of not eating it.
Who ever said it’s not okay for men to ask for help!? I’m pretty sure that’s a personal pride thing more than a societal norm, or is at least a societal norm because so many men let pride get in the way. Small men tend to be embarrassed if they don’t know how to do something that’s perceived as simple, and don’t know how to handle that emotion so it is either dismissed or becomes a point of frustration.
Why do you think those men make it a point of pride not to ask for help? It’s because they’ve internalized the subtle (and not-so-subtle) messaging that they’ve received since childhood that asking for help is weakness, and weakness is bad, because you’re a man so you’re supposed to be strong and know how to do everything by yourself.
Social norms and individual behaviors are a chicken and the egg situation. Yes, societal norms are made up of individual behaviors. However, those behaviors are also influenced by societal norms. And often, society punishes any deviation from those norms.
It’s literally the same process that teaches women to do the things that basically all of the feminist literature ascribes to societal norms and internalized messaging. It’s the same process. So why do people always try to invalidate it whenever someone brings up the male side of that coin?
He’s probably injecting his message and destination into someone elses data transmission lmao
Let’s put a positive spin on this
Genuinely: why???
Because we should encourage people to be smart enough to realize they’re doing something dumb and ask someone to help or make sure they’re doing things correctly.
The last thing we need in this world are more aggressively stupid people inordinately confident that they’re doing shit right while doing nothing but fucking up.
The one thing that is bothering me a little… Like I was on my own in college at 18. While I wasn’t really “taught” how to cook for myself I at least observed my mom and dad over 18 years cooking. I’ve seen them use baking sheets in the oven, and never just directly on the rack.
My question is where was this guy for 20 years? Was he never in the kitchen helping set the table? Emptying the dishwasher/doing dishes while mom was making dinner? Did he just disappear at all times and thought some magic genie made food?
Because the fact that you’re seeing this in the first place shows something deeply wrong with how people interact these days.
We should be free to make mistakes. Just because you had a perfectly predictable childhood doesn’t mean everyone does. If you didn’t have a perfectly predictable childhood then you need to practice some empathy.
Guy is trying to learn. That shouldn’t get him posted for everyone to make fun of.
First, you don’t know anything about me, what a weird thing to say.
Second, guy isn’t here. Guy possibly doesn’t even exist. This isn’t about guy and his needs, it’s about the needs of the people actually present. I don’t think you are seeing through your own bullshit well enough to have actual insight into, “Why?”
Lastly, if you think this is how we meaningfully express empathy to each other, I suggest this is more about feeling like you are practicing empathy than actually practicing it in meaningful ways.
Mmk buddy, let me know when you’ve figured out how to remove your head from your ass.
That was 6 yrs ago. Wonder how lil bro is doing 😂
To shreds you say…
I assume he’s doing great.
My mans was cooking his own food; realized (own his own) that his way of cooking was suboptimal; and then asked for help.
That approach is to life is going take him far.
He’s probably drinking
Hopefully got a pack of baking sheets from the supply house or Costco. Baking sheets, cutting boards, mixing bowls take up so much room but are universally useful.
I was excited to take home ec, but little did I realize it was basically for people who had never been in a kitchen before. If you were a kid who had parents/grandparents who cooked and let you help out, you were miles ahead of the game.
We made brownies. From a box. Taco salad. Forget what else but it was all box food type stuff. If you’re a kid in the US who doesn’t have a home cooking tradition Home Ec isn’t going to teach you shit.
I helped out in the kitchen a lot, but the home ec classes I took were things that I wasn’t (yet) doing at home.
My mom made scrambled eggs, but the way they taught me to do it in home ec resulted in much better eggs. They taught me how to make tacos, my mom didn’t know about tacos at all.
I think the issue is that my mom really learned very little from her own mother because her own mother wasn’t much of a cook. My mom cooked every day. She had cook books. She had a few recipes handed down from relatives. But, she didn’t know what she didn’t know, which was a lot. Almost everything was overcooked and dry. She didn’t know how to taste what she was cooking and adjust things. She didn’t understand the purpose of the ingredients in the recipes she made, so she’d substitute things that completely ruined it.
I think my home ec classes were much better than the ones you had. But, also, my mom wasn’t very good at cooking. So, home ec was really useful for me.
Now we have the internet: an entire world of inspiration, variation, coming with strips and perhaps a video! No more excuses
They taught me how to make tacos
One of the things still on my list. I grew up learning to make tacos from my mom: buy a kit with crunchy shells, a spice pack to brown ground meat with, preshredded lettuce and cheese.
But I’ve had some amazing tacos that look nothing like those and are so much better. I’ve started exploring making real tacos with actual ingredients and with tortillas l, but there’s so much more to try and to learn even for such a simple food.
Currently I really like the Costco family taco kit. Real ingredients, So good, so convenient, inexpensive for prepared food, and better than anything I make.
I recommend a trip to Mexico. The street tacos there are nothing like the hard shell tacos that are common in grocery stores.
Just the variety of meat fillings is huge: Suadero, Barbacoa, Chorizo, Carnitas, Carne Asada…
The tacos are also small and cheap. That means you can try a variety of different ones without filling up, and obviously without worrying about the cost. Even places in the US and Canada that sell pretty authentic tacos typically make them fairly big and fairly expensive, so you have to choose one flavour per sitting. You may get 3 tacos in an order. That same amount of filling would be spread among 10 tacos in Mexico so you can either have a small snack, or have a variety of different tacos for a full meal.
That would be excellent! It’s on my list
One of my teachers took us out hunting once. Shot a hare. We were there for every part of that journey from the hunt to it being on the plate and eaten. I definitely learned a lot from that.
Did you learn metallurgy to make the gun tho?
I knew I missed one class!
Also chemistry to make the gunpowder
That’s what shop class was for
When I had it, we learned much more than just cooking…
I remember they taught us how to do laundry, how to iron clothes, how to sew, how to balance a checkbook (yeah I’m old shut up), among other things.
Very useful actually, and despite it being over 2 decades ago, I still know how to do all of it.
Makes me really sad when people can’t make a cake without a box or can’t make a basic roux or something. Really take for granted my privellege to have been exposed to basic stuff like that.
My first boyfriend in college taught me how to make a roux. It’s such a useful building block for all sorts of foods. We’d make leek and potato stew, generally using the fat from bacon for the roux. Highly recommend as a filling meal for college students.
Like with any class it really depends on your teacher.
Also depends on whether you live in a regressive borderline fascist state that views education as either propaganda for them or propaganda for us.
Huh, it just occurred to me that when people say “Glad school taught me the Pythagorean theorem but not real life skills like how to do my taxes”, they’re just forgetting about home ec.
Bold of you to assume schools even have home ec classes anymore.
I’m pretty sure they phased those out in the late 00s to early 10s, at least in the school districts around me.
Or they never even had it offered.
I never had the option of taking something like that I school, but thankfully my family cooked enough that I got rather good at cooking and spicing food. I’ve actually taught my wife how to do it, and we’re in the process of trying to teach our partner how to cook now.
Home Ec was an elective class for me (that I didn’t take) as an alternative to Personal Health, a low-impact PE course with an emphasis on nutrition (that I also didn’t take). We did not have any other practical skills classes, like wood shop or automotive whatever. Poverty district.
Yeah Home Ec was an elective for me too, but it did exist.
Pretty sure it existed in my school but that was for kids not on a college track.
My brother took “small engines”, if you include that as home ec. Basically how to take apart and rebuild a lawn mower
We learned about food safety (“don’t leave stuff on the counter forever”, “raw chicken is bad for you”), how to properly hand wash dishes, how to budget for a household, and a bit about the various non-nuclear family shapes. (Yes, I learned about divorce in 6th grade. It just hadn’t come up in my life before. No mention of non-hetero couples or non-married couples because, you know, Kentucky in the 90s.) It was a broad life skills class with an emphasis on cooking. Not a clue what we cooked, but we got to use a flour sifter and that was fun.
I think my school only offered sewing. I have clue where they would have cooked, except for the cafeteria kitchen. I made a dope walrus, though.
My middle school had a cooking class and a sewing class, each of which we all took at different times. I saved my favorite recipe from the cooking class (a poppy seed cake) and made it a few times even after the class was over (but have since lost the recipe for.) I remember we used a pudding mix in it, which I wouldn’t have thought to do before. Meanwhile in sewing, we made letter-shaped pillows of our initials, which I really enjoyed. I ended up hand-sewing the rest of the letters of my name after the class was over to go along with it.
The only complaint I have is that the electives for my middle school (which were mandatory, so hardly “elective”) were cooler than the electives for my high school. I remember other schools having things like metal shop and swimming. A friend from Canada had an entire booklet of electives to choose from. My school had a single sheet of options, many with stupid names that didn’t reflect what they really were. I ended up taking an interior design class because the name made it sound like it would teach practical home skills. Granted, I still enjoyed the class and learned a lot from it (and have been able to apply the knowledge, even if just when building in the Sims.) Though if the classes had descriptions that actually fit what they were teaching, I probably would’ve taken something else. There were even a few boys who had signed up for that class, just to transfer out after the first day. Like me, they thought they’d be learning how to handle home finances or something, not learning how to identify a Queen Anne era chair by the style of its legs.
Damn, sewing would have been so much more useful than the religion classes I had
The most homemade thing I made in home ec in the 90s was pancakes.
I already made pancakes at home lol
Such an odd juxtaposition between recognizing the oven needed to be cleaned and not thinking of a way to prevent the mess lol.
Hope the young chef is still in the kitchen and better than ever.
Hope that one day he develops problem solving skills.
Edit: put something under the dripping thing FFS
My sister once had a roommate who asked her what goes into a grilled cheese sandwich. She said just two pieces of bread and a slice of cheese. A few minutes later she found the roommate in the kitchen staring at a plain cheese sandwich on a plate. “Something wrong?” she asked. Roommate replied (I shit you not), “How is this supposed to melt the cheese?”
Also forgot the mayo
I just put cheese in it and then fry it in butter. But I’ve seen people butter the outsides.
This comment broke me
A little mayo on the bread, a little butter melted in the skillet
Just put mayo on the outside of the bread and use that to fry it up instead of the butter. Plenty enough oil in the mayo
I do put it on the outside. I like the crisp mayo makes but prefer the taste of butter so I meet myself in the middle and use both. A bothersomely fast metabolism makes up for the extra fat
I like the way mayo on the outside turns out, but it’s a pain in the ass to make it that way and not enough of an improvement over butter in the pan for the hassle
Ew
Mayo has eggs, oil, and vinegar in it. As it breaks down while cooking the vinegar cooks off, the eggs french-ify the bread, and the oil fries the eggs onto the bread as it turns into toast. It works wonders for sandwiches cooking in a pan.
Don’t forget the mustard!
Lol shows what you know. Do you also cook right on the oven rack?
At least he recognized that he should clean the blood and grease every time. I’ve seen plenty of ovens that suggest that their owner would not be as diligent.
If it’s carbonized then is sterile!!!
as someone who’s used to working with sterile machinery, let me tell you: a mass of carbonized organic matter can still harbor bacteria deep inside when it’s not FULLY carbonized, and release them when it breaks.
Well, not mentioning everything else it can release.
I once shared an apartment with a guy who just moved out of home and had literally zero life skills. One day he almost burnt down the kitchen by heating about 500ml of oil in a frypan till it was smoking and then proceeded to drop in a kilo of fully frozen chicken pieces.
Uni halls with international students who have zero real world skills, and are used to the staff/maid cooking for them. They started 3 fires and ruined so much food before giving up on using the kitchen altogether.
I had to go to the student housing council or whatever when I had an international student take the room in my on campus apartment mid year while I was in college. Dude didn’t speak English and my roommate and I were NOT paying for the damage some rich kid did because he couldn’t clean up the water from the toilet and sink. Also, who the fuck wants to constantly deal with standing water in your bathroom??
How’s he supposed to know if nobody every taught him?
“Common sense” is rarely all that common.
Often people forget (or more commonly: don’t know) that homo sapiens are called like that because we were the only* species of homo that actively tries to give all the knowledge they had to their kids
*well, we weren’t the only ones, homo erectus and other homos did it too to a certain extent i belive
I operate strange new machines all the time. There’s usually some kind of instructions or video. Never activate the device without trying to figure it out first, you won’t even know what sort of personal protective equipment to wear.
You’re not wrong. But dang some things seem kinda obvious.
I use cook my ramen noodles in the bowl I would eat them out of
Looking back that’s incredibly stupid but my thought at the time was, “I got to put the noodles in something, how about a bowl?”
So I’d put the noodles in a bowl (glass or porcelin or whatever they’re made out of these days), pour water in, put it on the stove
Lucky the bowl never exploded on me
Why a pot wasn’t the first thing that came to my mind I’ll never know… Weirdly, I don’t know when I realized I was being stupid. Just one day I was like, “I should put my noodles in a pot”
I use cook my ramen noodles in the bowl I would eat them out of
Seems pretty normal, just pour the kettle into the bowl…
stove
Oh, oh no…
I would eat out of the pot instead. Now Im refined and I microwave the bowl of water to heat it up, once its close to boiling, drop the noodles in and put a lid on it to lock in the steam. Wait 5 minutes and were good to go.
My younger one learned this lesson very dramatically when a glass measuring cup full of ramen blew up on the stovetop! No one got hurt, so it was a good lesson
I have to admit that no one ever said not to do that: it seems so fundamental. But even stuff that seems obvious have to be learned somehow
That’s great! I am impressed the bowls survived.
Even a pot shouldn’t be the first thing that comes to your mind. It should be an electric kettle. Or are you from the US where you can’t use electric kettles (efficiently) cos ur shitty electrical grid runs only on 120V and therefore it takes ages to boil the water lol
A kettle? What’s that?
I did try shooting my gun a whole bunch and cooking them with the heated up barrel
In Canada our electricity also only goes to 120v, but the simple solution for this is to utilize the already hot water from the water heater. The hot tap on full already comes out steaming. Add that to the electric kettle and it takes less than a minute to boil 500ml.
I’ve always been told the water from the hot water tap isn’t safe to drink due to bacterial and mineral buildup in the water heater. Not that I can drink my tap water where I live anyway (America!) but even when I lived with delicous well water I never drank the hot tap water.
I thinks it’s more lead )and other metal) accumulation but yeah ……
The first time I remember hearing a specific , not generic, concern was when legionnaires became A thing several decades ago. People were turning down their water temperature to save money. But legionnaires is more tolerant of heat than most other germs, so there’s a window of opportunity where the water is hot enough to kill off most diseases but cool enough to let legionnaires flourish.
Even today, you’re supposed to keep hot water at 120°F at the tap to prevent scalding but your water heater at 140°F to kill off legionnaires. Most people dont
That’s crazy, I’ve never heard that. I know our hot water heaters are kept high enough that bacteria can’t grow, and every source I’ve found says the other risk is lead contamination, and we don’t have any lead pipes in our house, so I’m going to assume this is an old outdated rule. Plus for the bacteria concern, it’s being boiled again anyway.
Even without lead pipes, it may be worth testing ….
- what about all the pipes bringing water to your house?
- copper pipes used lead-based solder for many years, so can still leach lead into hot water
My reason for not putting hot water into the kettle is that I need to run the water for a bit to get it hot, and that takes longer than the few seconds I’d save
1: all the pipes leading to my house are out of my control and will be sending the same temperature and purity of water regardless of what temperature I set the tap to? The water goes into my house, to the hot water heater, to the tap. Or just into my house to the tap. Either way whatever is outside of that is outside of my control and the hot water heater can’t cause the water to retroactively absorb lead from pipes outside of my house.
And as for your second point. Running the kettle from cold takes like 4-5mins. Running the hot water to max temp takes 30 secs. Running the kettle with max temp water takes 1:30-2 mins. That’s still like a 50% time savings, for a 500ml load. I haven’t tried with larger amounts than that because I don’t need more than that, but I assume that the greater the volume of water, the more time it would take from cold.
Well yeah, but if u put it into a kettle and boil it, it should be fine, cos boiling kills the bacteria.
Do me a favor, fill 2 cups, one with tap hot water, one with cold. Let them go to room temperature and taste them. Hot has a taste, and it’s not great.
Okay, now bring two cups to room temperature and then boil both and tell me you can tell the difference. I’m not talking about drinking hot water straight from the tap.
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And ppl wonder why the younger gens are terrified of doing anything fun or risky.
“Hey guys! I have a CRAZY idea! Let’s put meat on the grates in the oven!” - Fun loving people millennial and older
They need to bring back home ec (economics).
Basic cooking, nutrition and finance. How taxes work, voting, credit, bills and even dealing with cops (be respectful, no sudden movements, know your rights, shut the fuck up).
How to adult for kids who don’t get taught at home.
Agreed. School focuses too much on stem. It should be there to prepare you for life. Go to Uni if you want to advance in stem.
School should also teach other basics like taxes, finance and budgeting.
And the S part of STEM is pretty important for actually understanding the issues facing voters (and our world)
And the T part of STEM is pretty important for actually functioning in the modern world of computing.
What is the EC part?
Pretty sure we still do cooking and “how to operate a kitchen” classes here in northern Europe. In Denmark it’s “hjemkundskab” - basically “skills for homekeeping”
Finances not so much though, that should be a class on its own
I think we’ve all been there when it comes to doing something or other at home in a way which turns out to be obvious stupid when pointed out, especially at the beginning.
Many of us were taught how to be a functional human being by our parents and/or guardians.
Parents never cover everything down to the smallest of details and even when they do the children themselves don’t remember everything.
For example, have you been taught how to remove, say, blood stains from clothing?
It’s the same effect as how one is taught something in a professional domain at School yet still has to learn quite a lot more when working at it professionally.
Mind you, this specific case can be “not remember a crucial detail of something you were taught”, but it can also be not at all being properly prepare by one’s parents and/or guardians to, as you say, be a functional human being.
have you been taught how to remove, say, blood stains from clothing?
Yes. Hydrogen peroxide works great but soaking fresh stains in cold water is a good way to start for delicate dyes. And I don’t even have a vagina.
More to the point, it’s not necessary to remember everything down the smallest detail if you have a foundational understanding of how things work. This isn’t rocket science, this is “squares have four sides”. Fat melts when it gets hot, contain it in something.
Yeah, I do admit this one specific case does fall into the “no real notion of how it works in general” level.
Surely after the first couple of times they should have figured out the whole dripping thing that “there must be an easier solution for this than cleaning the oven each time”
I can see how they’d get to the conclusion that they did, at least. I’m sure they saw the grills in the oven and thought that it was like an outdoor grill, and then never thought about it beyond that conclusion and assumed that everyone just had to deal with cleaning the gross oven mess every time.
To be fair to him, if you’ve never specifically cooked meat in an oven I can see how you’d think “grill -> like barbecue -> place directly on grill”.
Oh dear.
