In movies, one lazy visual shorthand that's often used to indicate "domestically indifferent bachelor" is to have the character come home to his spartan apartment, loosen his tie, and take out a frozen dinner, which he proceeds to toss into the microwave. This is crucial, the tossing of the dinner, for some reason the toss suggests a Real Guy who doesn't much care what he's eating and isn't concerned with the niceties of its preparation, preoccupied as he is with the pressures of his job or whatever it is that preoccupies Real Guys besides pussy. So apparently Real Guys throw food. Maybe it's meant to harken back to cavemen throwing woolly mammoth limbs on the fire.

Anyway, then the character pushes one or two buttons and the microwave starts humming, and notice that he hasn't so much as glanced at the cooking instructions printed on the box. In movies, microwave ovens are often treated like regular ovens, people put things in them and then just turn them on for an open-ended cooking duration, as if there's not much difference between ninety seconds and ten minutes. As a bonus, the character will then pick up the cordless phone and call his soon-to-be-ex girlfriend, cradling the phone between his cheek and shoulder, blithely weaseling his way out of the relationship as he pours himself a glass of wine. While barely listening to her emotional female manipulations, the cad takes his dinner out of the microwave, and it's magically perfect and ready to eat, but in a sad TV dinner sort of way. We're meant to view him as both pathetic and admirably masculine. Well, I've got one out of two covered.

I don't know about you, but I find microwave cooking instructions increasingly unwieldy. In fact I've been known to take frozen dinners out of my shopping cart and put them back after deciding that the preparation looks like "too much trouble". First, you have to look all over the box to find the directions, sometimes they're on the side, on the little strip of cardboard you've already ripped off to get the box open, which was why the real "pull here" tab was on the other side, you idiot. Then, you've got this recent phenomenon of multipart directions, you've gotta make a slit over one of the sections, then cook at full power for a certain number of minutes, then peel back the film layer, stir, replace the film layer, then reduce power to 50%, then cook an additional vague amount of time, like "one and half to four minutes". Well, which is it? I don't want hazy instructions, tell me what to do! I think it's a sign of society's moral decay that such certainty is hard to come by even in the circumscribed world of TV dinners.