Blog Post #34: Kitchen Time

“Important conversations happen in the kitchen”.

That’s a quote I saw today, in large free-flowing letters, on the glow of a neon sign. Recently, I’ve been spending a lot of time in kitchens- usually the dorm kitchen on the first floor of my building. I’m usually in the kitchen at night, around 10 or 11pm, and I’m always with a few friends. I think I’ll call them my kitchen friends. Our conversation flows from topic to topic. My kitchen friends are mostly international students from India and Pakistan, so occasionally, the language slips to Hindi. When this happens I sit, simply enjoying the experience of trying to understand a language. I watch their body language and grasp the occasional English word, dropped like a present from a hot air balloon in the sky.

Sometimes I feel guilty for spending so many late nights in that kitchen. Perhaps my kitchen time could be spent on more hours at the piano, or getting ahead on homework. But ultimately, my kitchen time with friends is a time I enjoy very much. In fact, I’d argue that college exists not just to provide students with a degree, but to allow us to sit together late at night and ponder, asking questions to which we may not know the answers, debate various topics, and sometimes, discuss our latest campus crush. When else in life will I live within 5 minutes walking distance of most of my friends and acquaintances? In the kitchen, my friends sip chai, and I drink my herbal tea so as not to consume caffeine before bed. Our seats at the round table never really change, so the person directly across from me is always framed by the glow of the blue Pepsi machine. When the conversation (and the temperature in the room) starts to get heated, we open the window to usher in the cool night breeze and occasional sound of college freshman chattering outside.

I’m sure we all have some form of “kitchen time”- whether or not it takes place in an actual kitchen is beside the point. We all have something we like to do, just for the sake of doing it. Our Outlook calendars, to-do lists, and voices in our heads may try and argue that we need to spend every waking second being productive. But I dare you, dear reader, to continue making space for the kitchen time in your life.