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Despite the less-than-impressive results, I'm not ashamed to say that over the past six or seven weekends, I've made a pretty goddamn valiant effort to make a sort of bagel sandwich for breakfast--one with like a fried egg, and melted cheese, and, if I'm feeling particularly ambitious, some avocado slices. I've failed fantastically pretty much every time. I almost set off my apartment's fire alarm on Saturday morning. It occurs to me that I should probably note that I'm really good at making exactly four types of food.

1) Macaroni and cheese
2) Cold cereal
3) Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches
4) Apples

You don't see stupid bagel/egg sandwiches up there because out of the past six or seven weekends, I've managed to not fuck up frying an egg exactly once, and I think that was just a fluke, as I have no idea how I managed to pull it off. In other words: I don't know what I'm doing, and I kind of need some help here, and I'd appreciate it if someone who, unlike me, has even the most basic culinary competence can give me a little bit of advice on the matter. Not so much because I actually want to eat one of these fabled, possibly imaginary homemade bagel/egg sandwiches at this point--no, now I pretty much fucking hate the things, just on principle and out of spite--but because I'm sick of my apartment reeking like burned eggs.

So for the first few weeks I was cooking on some battered, ancient frying pan with cancer-y flakes of Teflon that got scraped up into the eggs every time I tried to flip them. This past weekend, blaming the pan for my previous failures, I went to Ikea and dropped $20 on a new frying pan, one that's hopefully sans cancer. Said frying pan is already ruined, with cooked-on olive oil like fossilized on there, as well as an irremovable streak of burned-on plastic, because yes, I also ruined the spatula, somehow melting it and, in the process, smearing tarry streaks of molten plastic into my latest culinary opus.

Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself. Here's how I've been trying to fry eggs. Maybe there's a really important step I'm missing or something.

1) Put a little bit of olive oil into the frying pan
2) Heat up the frying pan on like medium hot. Wait until I can feel the heat coming off of it
3) Drop an egg in
4) Wait for it to look kind of cooked on one side before flipping it over
5) Flip it over
6) Wait for that side to look kind of cooked
7) Hope for the best

Usually at the second step, I fuck up and shit starts smoking and I have to start over before there's even an egg in the pan. Usually at the fourth step I realize I don't actually know what it should look like when it's done. Step five always, always results in the yolk breaking, and a burst of yellow oozing over the pan. Step six is usually rushed, out of anger and hunger. Step seven is always a disappointment. And it might have made me kind of sick this weekend.

I always end up eating these abominations--even the one that, in hindsight, probably contained a fair amount of melted spatula--and I don't know why. Stubbornness, I guess.

Anyway: Help, please. Simple instructions on frying an egg would be so, so appreciated right now. Otherwise fuck it and I'm going back to cold cereal.