I have found what I want to do with my life.

Tonight, I cooked a complete dinner for two of my neighbors on their 35th wedding anniversary. The preparation was flawless, from the garlic mashed potatoes to the vegetable medley to the veal scallopini with port wine sauce and oyster mushrooms to the chocolate cake and focaccia. It is a beautifully exciting and terrifying thing to blacken seafood--to throw your twenty dollars of choice scallops, shrimp and salmon into a glowing-hot skillet and see it all instantly enveloped in a giant miasma of smoke and flame to be tossed out of it all perfectly a mere minute later. I spent 13 dollars in forty seconds when I flash-fried my pink veal cutlets (the butcher thought me mad, a 16 year-old kid buying quite a bit of very expensive meat). Flames shot out of the pool of cheap red wine as it smacked against the skillet with a screaming sizzle. I made some people really happy tonight; they hugged and thanked me as I left their kitchen with my box of assorted cookware (I cooked at my place on the gas range and brought my products next door). I forgot that they paid me, because money means nothing after all that. And I would be nothing without my father, who is a great, wise and practical man, and my mother, pastry chef extraordinaire whose advice had I not had the luxury of (not to mention years of teaching me tidbits of information), I would've broken down and cried into my cake batter.