Melted Monday: How are avocados ruling my life?

After a few years living out of home, my Friday night drinks with friends are increasingly kicking off with complaints about the parts of adulthood nobody warned us about: the price of tyres, how water is not free despite being a human right, and how hard it is to decide what to have for dinner every night.

Personally, I feel we all should have been prepared for that last one, having watched my mother paralysed with this question at least weekly as a child, despite me always presenting the obvious answer: spaghetti bolognaise. This usually does the trick for me as an adult too, so I would like to offer an alternative complaint.

How the f*ck does avocado dictate my entire week?

Before I hear ‘you millennials who eat smashed avocado every day are ruining your finances and life’ – I am not a millennial and I already own a house, so ha! (No more questions about my finances please.)

This is not a cost complaint, it’s a contract complaint.

I like to make burritos, haloumi burgers and tuna rice bowls – all simple and cost-effective meals that are routinely sabotaged by the rock-hard avocado imposters plotting against me at Coles, ALDI or the local market (doesn’t matter which, they’re all hard).

Now I hear you asking ‘why not save those meals until the end of the week so they have time to ripen?’

I do.

I strategise to eat the bangers and mash first, overlooking my favourite meals all week so I can have my Friday night burger with perfectly smooth guacamole, only to be let down. Still not ripe. Not hard necessarily, slightly soft, but not ripe enough to smash and eat.

These inevitably end up being the next week’s avocados which are somehow overripe by that time, forcing me to eat smashed avocado toast 3 days in a row to avoid wasting them.

I don’t expect a violin to play for me, but I would like to point out that I have followed the contract. I accepted the hard avocados for who they were when purchased. I exchanged my hard-earned money and waited patiently for the agreed upon number of days until the science says I can eat them.

I would just like some reciprocity, some respect from the avocados, and a warning from those who came before me. Someone warn the children. We can still save them.

Reading: Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb

This is a re-read from a few years ago, one of the few books that I feel has genuinely stayed with me. The memoir from an American therapist and writer explores the complexity of a profession masked in confidentiality and curiosity.

Lori explores what it takes to be a therapist while being the patient of one, and what these conversations can reveal about the parts of ourselves we hide away.

Brain rehab: Rivals

Highly stressful and scandalous as ever, season 2 of Rivals just landed on Disney+ and is keeping my jaw on the floor with each episode. Based in the UK in the 1980s, 2 media empires fight for relevance, funding and domination while doing anything it takes to ruin each other’s opportunities and lives. There’s affairs, attempted murder and blackmail – while somehow finding the time for budding sweet romance and the occasional well-placed chuckle.

That’s all!

Stay toasty.