Recently, I achieved immortality. Yes, you read that right — in spite of wretchedly unhealthy lifestyle habits like smoking a pack a day, drinking beer, ordering my bagels with a sizable cumulo-nimbus of lox spread, crossing against the light, and making snide comments to people who probably have licensed firearms hidden in their underpants, I can defy all the logic of medical science and look forward to living forever. How, you might wonder, did I manage this mythological feat — consumption of vast quantities of wheat germ? An unfortunate incident involving Jupiter, King Of The Gods? A hastily-made deal with Old Scratch in which, in exchange for shopping at the Gap and drowning the occasional puppy, the dark lord and his minions have not only arranged my eternal life but also send thousands more readers to Tomato Nation? No, no, and no. I scored my exemption from death quite easily, and you can do it just as easily if you follow these simple steps:

1. Start your own business;

2. Cease having time for such quaint hobbies as eating, sleeping, maintaining friendships, and taking any interest in your personal appearance;

3. Begin taking all your meals in a convenient boil-in bag or microwave tray;

4. Send your deep-tissue levels of polysorbate-80 and guar gum into the stratosphere.

Once you have the required level of man-made preservatives coursing through your bloodstream — preservatives which, since they stave off rot and disease from such frail and sickly foods as the Jimmy Dean Sausage, must surely serve the same purpose on a vital human body, even one which has not employed an exercise tape as anything other than a beverage coaster in well over four months — then voil‡! You can chuck that bike helmet in the trash and kick back with a Bagel Bite. Remember: a Stouffer’s a day keeps the Grim Reaper away.

All right, all right, disregard everything I just said, because we live in a litigious society, and god forbid somebody doesn’t get the joke and starts freebasing carageenan and I get sued by that somebody’s mom, which I can’t afford. But as I lunched on yet another Green Giant entree today at midday, I felt compelled to look for the bright side in all the defrosting I’ve done lately. I mean, last week, my dad sent me an e-mail offering to take me out to dinner when he came to town for a meeting, saying that I could “take a break from cooking,” which forced me to write back, “‘Cooking’? What is this ëcooking’ of which you speak?” I’ve cooked exactly once in the last month, for a potluck at Dwanollah’s House Of Terrifyingly Delicious Fondue, and as the name probably indicates, I didn’t think I could get away with the “but I got the good salsa” routine, because when my hostess goes the cocktail-onion distance, I don’t want to insult her intelligence with Pace Picante, so I cooked, and it came out well and everyone complimented the dish, but seriously, Ray Charles could make this dish while wearing boxing gloves, which I took pains to point out to the assembled folk, lest they get the mistaken idea that I know my way around a kitchen — or, more accurately, that I’ve tried to learn.

I would just say “I can’t cook” and leave it there, but really, I can cook. Anyone who can read and tell time can cook if she sets her mind to it. In fact, as a girl, I used to enjoy cooking and helping out in the kitchen. I had birthday-cake and bake sale-muffin detail at our house, and I had a great time (of course, I might have just “had a time” if I hadn’t had licking the bowl as my ulterior motive, but the less said about the time my mother found me with my entire head inside the stainless-steel basin of the electric mixer, the better). In those days, though, I had plenty of time to cook; I could experiment all I wanted with corn-flake cobblers and butterscotch-chip muffins and while away forty-five minutes peeling the potatoes so that they all sported little plaid jackets. Also, it seemed more worthwhile to cook for other people. I wouldn’t have bothered with a cake or brownies most times if a parent hadn’t had a birthday, or if my brother hadn’t bemoaned the lack of fat-packed snacks in the house.

These days, I just don’t have the time. I work seventeen hours a day most days, and I just can’t justify spending an hour preparing a dish that I will eat in five minutes, alone, while standing up in the kitchen or hunched over the computer waiting for files to upload. When the Biscuit comes to visit, I’ll cook if we have the time, but usually, he has just as much work as I do, so often we order in, and if I have another “working supper” ahead of me, I’d rather just call the health-food restaurant and order enough dishes for the next three days than build a balanced meal myself.

And I only know how to make seven dishes anyway. I can make baked chicken. I can make spaghetti. I can make tortelloni with spinach and tomatoes, potato goulash, curried rice with chickpeas, and pasta salad with mustard-dill sauce, and for dessert I can make melon balls a peche. Oh, and grilled cheese, and a variation on English-muffin pizza known in some circles as “the salami McMommy,” so I can make nine things and I can fry an egg in a pinch, but even the more impressive-sounding dishes don’t take much effort or skill. The tortelloni involves, basically, boiling water and cutting stuff up. The goulash requires opening cans, dicing potatoes, and standing around with a slotted spoon for an hour. The melon-ball one, despite the French name I just made up for it, is so embarrassingly easy that I won’t even tell you how to make it. But friends of mine, friends with schedules just as busy as mine, make really good meals. Ernie buys and prepares real Polish sausages. Big A makes crab dip — from scratch. It might not sound impressive to some of you, but I buy pre-sliced cheese to save time, so I’m impressed. When I visit my parents, I watch my mother cruising around the kitchen on auto-cook, and I can’t get over it: she almost never looks at the recipes because she’s memorized them; she gets everything to the table at the same time (I can never do that); and everything tastes great. Ma doesn’t do anything all that fancy, ordinarily, but again, I’m just shooting for “not charred beyond recognition” over here, and I know I’ve said this before, but the woman’s meatloaf rocks. My dad has cracked the occasional joke about her failures with roast chicken early in their marriage, but Ma makes it look so easy — she’s stirring the rice, she’s talking on the phone, she’s balancing the books of a local charity organization and dicing celery. I would beg her to cater my life, but I always have a mouthful of thoughtfully-provided snacks and I can’t get the words out.

See, my mother actually gets off her butt and does the grocery shopping more than once a fortnight, like a grown-up. I’ve already documented my pathological dread of marketing in this space, so I won’t go into it again, but suffice it to say that the thrill of the new Gristede’s has worn off completely. I march in, grab a basket, and head straight for the frozen-foods aisle to stock up on various sub-zero entrees that I can throw in the oven and forget about until the timer goes off . . . unless . . . I go shopping hungry. I inevitably go shopping in the evening, right around the time when lunch has departed for my large intestine, and my small intestine starts saying things like, “Hey, hummus!” and “You haven’t had Chips Ahoy in awhile — look, low-fat Chips Ahoy!” and “Oh, come on — guacamole is made FROM A VEGETABLE.” Twenty minutes later, I arrive home, staggering under the weight of three bags’ worth of semi-sugary cereals, garlicky specialty crackers (to go with the olive hummus hand-mixed by Dominican friars that costs five bucks a pop), dried fruit, the new kind of Dorito that tanked in the focus groups and now costs a mere eighty-nine cents a bag, twelve frozen dinners, and three bags of pre-mixed salads that cancel out their own low-fat dressing by putting three times as much of it in the little plastic pouch. Remember the scene in Better Off Dead when Lloyd’s family gives him all those turkey trays for Christmas? I saw that movie the other day on cable, and I found myself envying him.

See, I don’t have time to cook, I don’t have any desire to cook, I don’t know enough dishes anyway, and the dishes I cook serve twelve people, and I wind up having to stuff my brother and three of his biggest-eating friends in a sack and hold them hostage until they help me finish the bale of lasagna in my fridge, but worst of all, I will never ever ever eat a balanced meal if I have crackers and cream cheese in the house. My parents encouraged us to eat right, but I can’t do it, I just can’t. The choice between preparing a nice lemon chicken with a potato and salad and plunking myself down at my desk with a brick of Havarti, a bag of bagel chips, and a sliced-up tomato to keep me honest? Not a choice. The Havarti wins every time. Vegetables? Great — with butter. Or sour cream. Or cheese. Or a combination of all three, preferably prepared by someone else and brought to my door with a menu stapled to it. I could cook, or I could call up my new friends at Six Happiness and order shrimp toast. I could cook, or I could boil a pot of water and let the nice folks at Birdseye do the rest.

I need to cook. I know this. I need to cook, or I will turn into Walter Hudson, go broke, get cancer, and come down with the first ever recorded case of MSG poisoning. My parents keep talking about gifting me with a microwave, and I know I should resist, because I’ve managed to avoid the nuked-burrito pitfall so far, but if I have a microwave in the house, I might as well buy the muu-muu now. I know I need to cook more, but . . . but . . . well, dammit, Ore-Ida is all-righta.

I CURSE YOU, O TEMPTING TATER TOT!

Kicking it up a notch.

My nemesis.

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