Congratulations Curry John!

You didn’t ask for this name.  You didn’t like it in elementary school, where people called you “Curry Johns,” which was, the kids eventually decided, a joke about how it looked like curry when you shit your pants which, of course, you did all the time in their collective imagination.  You didn’t like it in high school, when people called you C-John and asked if you were selling weed, despite your straight edged rep.  And you absolutely hated it in college, where people constantly made jokes about you “currying favor” with faculty.

Your life hasn’t been the best, we won’t lie.  But other people have had worse lives.  I mean, just think about everyone in Yemen.  Egypt is nuts right now.  It’s important to keep things in context.  Still, life hasn’t been amazing.

You tried to run from your name, but a trust established when you were a boy by your father and a serious inability to hold down a normal, paying job has insured that you cannot, for financial reasons, ever actually change your name. You haven’t known a moment’s peace in decades.

Today you’re going to turn a corner.  Today you’re going to enter culinary school.

Today you’re going to become a world class chef, specializing in Punjabi cuisine.

The school will be in India.  It’ll be relatively cheap and, thanks to your trust, you’ll be able to live quite comfortably while you attend it.  Today will be your first day which, of course, will be tedious.  Filled with paperwork and meetings you’d just as soon have skipped.  But in the weeks that come, in the months that come, you’ll find that you actually quite enjoy cooking.  Not curries, per sec, but briyanis, vindaloos and khormas.  You’ll have a knack for curries, sure, but your passion will be cooking traditional Punjabi food with a sort of ineffable western flair.

You’ll graduate at the head of your class, move back to upstate New York and spend your late twenties to early thirties introducing white people to amazingly tasty Indian food.  When you are finally called to your father’s death bed, decades from today, you’ll kiss him on the forehead and thank him.  He’ll smile and tell you he was always proud of him.  Then he’ll shit the bed as he dies, because that’s apparently a real thing.  It’ll be gross, but part of an amazing catharsis, so we think the whole affair constitutes a net positive.

And it all starts today.

Congratulations Curry John!