A Greek Tragedy on Pi Day

So many of the best Greek tragedies, and really tragedies in general, rest on the idea of hubris. Generally one thinks of hubris, if one thinks of it at all, as a folly of youth, but I'm here to tell you a tale of hubris from yesterday morning, starring me and a pie crust.

Our story begins, as so many do, with a tiny act. See, a few months ago I bought my friend a Harry Potter spatula at Williams Sonoma, and let them email my receipt rather than printing a paper one. Since that day, I receive one to three emails from Williams Sonoma a day telling me about sales and reasons why I should rush to their store to by four hundred dollar toasters and hundred dollar mixing bowls. Yesterday morning, for Pi Day, they sent me one about "6 Pie Essentials", which I casually deleted and then tweeted about.

Thanks for your thoughtful email, Williams Sonoma, but I don't really need 6 pie-making essentials right now.

Please email when you have toilet paper.

The stage is now set to move on with our story.

Around lunch time yesterday, after a morning of cleaning, laundry, reading, and video games, I realized that I didn't have any pie to celebrate Pi Day. I thought about running to the store to pick up a small one, but then remembered that I'm supposed to be practicing social distancing right now, and trying to stay in my apartment instead of running out to the store whenever the impulse hits me.

"What if I just made a pie?" I thought, surveying the contents of my cabinets. Mixed in with a dozen boxes of Jello, I noticed a box of instant chocolate pudding and pie filling. "All I need, really, is a pie crust. People make pie crust all the time. How hard can it be? I mean, I own a hundred cookbooks. One of them must have a recipe."

So, hours after casually mocking the idea that there are pie essentials that I might need help with (making pie crust is probably one of them), I decide to make a pie.

Hubris.

Now, on with our tragedy. I started by surveying the book case where I keep most of my cookbooks:



My parents got that bookcase as a wedding gift. It has survived a dozen moves over the years, and the only damage is a chip in the corner of one of the sliding door panels. It holds most of my cookbooks, although there is a shelf of overflow cookbooks in the second bedroom, which I sometimes grandly refer to as The Library. I picked through for a few minutes, and found a basic recipe for pie crust. I had all the ingredients, so I preheated the oven and got started on the pie crust.

The recipe said that the butter needed to be really cold, so I cubed it and then put it in the freezer for ten minutes:



Then I prepared to cut the butter into the flour and salt:



After adding the ice cold water, the recipe insisted that I now had pie dough.



It didn't look like pie dough. It looked like a pile of sad ruins, but I had now used butter and flour on it during our time of social distance, which meant I shouldn't waste it to just make pudding. I soldiered onward, and followed the instructions, which said to roll out my dough.



The recipe gave no indication that the dough could stick to the rolling pin. When I talked to my mom this morning about it she casually said, "Oh, you didn't put enough flour on your rolling pin," but the recipe didn't say to put any flour on the rolling pin. I pointed this out, and mom added, "Everyone knows you put flour on the rolling pin."

I guess everyone doesn't know, but maybe it was one of the six essential tips that I, in my hubris, deleted and mocked.

Eventually, I gave up on trying to roll out the dough, and just plopped it into the pan and pressed it into shape with my fingers.



This is not ideal pie crust.

I baked it anyway and it came out even worse.



Actual bakers are probably staring at that in horror, but I was all in at this point. I waited for it to cool, then filled it with my newly mixed chocolate pie filling and put it in the fridge. The finished product looked mostly like a pie, with sloppy edges.



It sliced right up, though:





and it tastes fine.

It would probably taste a little better if I'd followed those six essential pie tips, though.

A Slice of Pie Day with a Scoop of Lois Lansesanity

Say, how do you feel about pie?



Oh, good. I hope a lot of my friends feel that way.



Lois, that's not very nice.





I'm not even having this conversation.

The reason why I was asking about pie is that I have agreed again this year to participate in Pie Day, a fundraiser for the university's Alternative Break Programs. I did it last year, and even though I'm not going on a break trip this year I still want to help. I may ask people to donate my pies specifically to the trip working with LGBTQ populations in New York City, but I'll probably just have it go into the general fund and let the office allocate my help however they think is best.



Really, Lois? How did that end up working out?



Of course it did.



Our story opens in downtown Metropolis, where Lois is covering an assignment "in the slums", because it was totally ok to call economically depressed neighborhoods the slums in 1959. Scanning the line at the soup kitchen, Lois spots a familiar face:





Lois has only met Lana one time before this story, so she doesn't hate her yet. In fact, she's actually helpful:



Lana immediately tries to repay Lois' generosity:



And that's the exact moment when a rivalry lasting the rest of their lives is born. (I'm not kidding. Despite the fact that both of them date other men over and over, Lois and Lana will continue fighting over Superman until Lana's horrible death at the hands of Lightning Lord and the Legion of Supervillains, a sad story for another day.)

Lana goes on to explain a story of how Superboy gave her the ring to make up for an injury to her finger after a bullet ricocheted off of him, which is a fairly normal occurance in the lives of people around Superboy. Lana treats the ring that she's had since she was a teenager as no big deal, but Lois spends the entire night seething, a fact that's glaringly obvious when she immediately mentions it to Superman the next day:



Seriously, when Superman says, "I don't want her to be jealous" he might as well just say, "I don't want her to be Lois", because we all know that she's insane. He tries to head her off at the pass:



and Lois decides to both plan him a dinner party and immediately brag to Lana:





Dinner doesn't go quite according to plan, though. Superman has barely sat down to eat when he suddenly becomes furious and superchills his lemonade with super-breath, destroying the glass. And why would he do such a thing?





Lana? Dear, sweet, innocent Lana?



Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Lana Lang, Queen of Sabotage. Not only does she manage to ruin the dinner party, but in just one panel she not only conveys complete disinterest in Lois' stupid drama but also does so while flashing her offensive ring at the same time.

She has no idea, though, that she's dealing with a woman who is completely insane.



Lois is watching you sleep and talking to herself in your bedroom, Lana. GET THE HELL OUT OF THERE. The calls are coming from inside the house. Seriously, imagine waking up in the middle of the night with that freakshow standing over you, babbling to herself.

Fortunately, Lois is immediately distracted the next day:



Why does she look so happy?

BECAUSE SHE'S CRAZY.

"Good news, Lana! Thousands of people are about to suffer, and some might even die! Get your camera!"

Lois, being Lois, even manages to turn this impending doom into an opportunity to throw herself at Superman:



Unfortunately for her, though, Lana remains five moves ahead of her on the chessboard of love:







Lois, you might want to start taking some notes. Or surrender. Lois, being Lois, decides to plot out an even better scheme while death-glaring Lana over dinner:



Tomorrow, you see, is a gala event honoring Superman, capped off with a female-only costume contest. Lois stays up all night sewing the perfect winning costume, but once again she's out of her depth, as her all-nighter ends in further disaster:





Has Lois finally met her match? And is Lana really the heartless man-stealer that she seems to be?



And why does all of this turn Superman on so much?

Lois finally reaches the end of her rope:



but it turns out that Lana was just trying to help her:



by keeping her from exploding:



That's somehow not good enough for Lois, though. Now that she's not going to blow up, she demands that Superman write down which one of them he loves the most:



And that's why I said that Superman was turned on by this whole thing.



What? No. That's not the moral of the story at all.

Unless you're Lois.

In My Time of Pieing

Over spring break, I will be an educational partner on an Alternative Spring Break trip to Washington, DC. The focus of my team's trip is the effects of poverty, and a group of 16 or so students and I will spend the week working in homeless shelters and soup kitchens. Most of the students who go describe it as a life-changing experience, and it gives our students the chance to give back and spend spring break in a meaningful, impactful way, rather than spending it getting hosed down in wet t-shirt contests or praying that their cruise ship doesn't break down or catch on fire. There is a fee for the students to go on the trip, but there are also multiple fundraising opportunities for the students to get the cost of their trip down. Since I don't pay, I volunteered to help with fundraising, which is how this happened:



Today, you see, was Pi Day, since the date is 3/14 and Pi = 3.14. Here at the university, we celebrated with a Pi(e) Day fundraiser, in which I:



and a number of other campus volunteers:



allowed people to pay $3 per pie to hit us with pies.

And hit us they did:











Sometimes they pied us in lines:





but mostly in singles:









Some people were oddly apologetic, as if compelled to pie against their will, but most people surrendered to the fun of grinding a plate of whipped cream into a friend or total stranger's face.



If you've never been pied, I can say a few things about it. It stops being cold after the first one, I think because the whipped cream oozes into all of your pores whether you wipe it off or not. You'll want to close your eyes when the pie is coming, of course, but after the first pie what you're really going to want (and can't have) is to close your nose. Everything smells like dairy for a while, and now, hours later, I can't smell anything at all. I keep blowing my nose, but I've kind of given up. Whatever is in there is bonded to the walls of my sinus cavity for now.

But it was all for a good cause.

And I found out that people will stare at you hard and then immediately jerk their eyes away if you grin wildly at them while walking to your car, smeared with half dried whipped cream.