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Charlie Hatton
Brookline, MA
I was cruelly tricked by my wife this weekend. She knows how I feel about shopping. I don’t like shopping, I’m not good at shopping, and I get very exasperated and pouty if I’m forced into shopping.
You’d think she’d understand. She feels the same way about reading this nonsense. But do I strap her in the car and drive her out to the suburbs to pore over these pages?
Only rarely. And never on weekends.
So this ‘shopping’ thing just wasn’t fair, dammit.
She knew better than to try a headlong shop-assault on me. We’ve been married a long time, and we’ve immunized ourselves against each others’ deadliest weapons — like the ‘puppy-eyed pleading question’. Oh, sure, that move worked fifteen years ago. She’d wander over to the couch some Saturday morning, poke her little toe into the ground and shyly say:
‘Hey, um, honey… do you want to go to the mall with me today?‘
And I’d look up into those big emerald eyes with her eyebrows all scrunchy, and it’d be all over. Six hours later, I’d find myself slogging through some Ann Taylor outlet or Victoria’s Secret Slightly Irregular Panty Paradise, lugging six bags of swag with no end in sight. But over time as a husband, you learn some things. You adapt. You survive.
Rule number one: don’t look at the eyes when a shopping trip comes up. Medusa could turn a man into stone with a glance; wives somehow transform us into pack mules for an afternoon. Personally, I’d prefer being made of granite. Seems easier to sneak a nap on the couch that way.
“If that doesn’t work, I think nightmarish thoughts of overstuffed parking lots and chatty cashier jockeys and pear-shaped octogenarian ladies modeling thong bikinis outside the dressing rooms.”
She learned a while back that turning on the charm for a trip to the mall doesn’t cut it any more. If I think there’s even a chance of a shopping ‘invitation’ coming, I slap on a pair of dark shades, bury my face in a pillow and ‘LALALALALALALA!!!‘ until she’s safely out of eyeshot. If that doesn’t work, I think nightmarish thoughts of overstuffed parking lots and chatty cashier jockeys and pear-shaped octogenarian ladies modeling thong bikinis outside the dressing rooms. That usually steels my resolve — or makes me nauseous enough to get out of going.
If all else fails, I fake my own death. I once stopped breathing for a full twelve minutes, just to get out of a Black Friday ‘early bird’ sale at Target. True story.
So the missus has picked up some new tricks of her own — like the one she unleashed this weekend, while I was merrily lazing away a Saturday afternoon melding my ass into the couch cushions. She nonchalantly brushed by on her way to the kitchen, dropping this off as the walked past:
‘Y’know — we should really have a grill.‘
She let the words hang in the air for a bit while she poured herself a Diet Coke. I tried not to give in — I knew it was a trap of some kind — but dammit, she was right. We should have a grill. Our condo has a deck, and we just had it rebuilt in the fall. We had a grill back at our house — too old and grimy and possibly leaking explosive propane fumes to bring with us, or to operate legally in any modern First or Second World nation, but still. We had one.
And now, we don’t. But we should. Now that she brought it up, I was appalled for us. How dare we not grill delicious dead animals on our very own deck? The nerve of us people.
By the time she sashayed back through, sipping her soda, I was hooked. More than hooked, I was riled up and ready for action. This called for a trip to the closest available home supply concern, to right the injustice which even now threatened to tear our way of life asunder.
Yes, never you mind that I was only just reminded of this unforgivable travesty a few brief moments ago — or that the situation, vis a vis our shameful grilllessness has been unchanged for the better part of a year and a half. These rational and measured observations are no match for the righteous indignation now coursing through my veins. To the chariot, my good woman! We must away, to claim that high-BTU flame-cooking power which is rightfully ours!
In other words, I played right into her hands. If I’d swallowed the bait any harder, I’d be shitting fish hooks all week.
Many of you married — or as-good-as-married — men will already know what happened next. We hustled out to the nearest Home Depot to, read my lips now, “look for a grill”. Two hours later, I awoke from a daze to find us trudging back to the car — in a downpour, I might add — toting twenty-four individually-potted pansies of various shades of pink, forty pounds of topsoil, three sacks of mulch, lawn bags, heavy gloves, a small spade and something called a Garden Weasel. But no grill.
I think I’m beginning to see who this “Garden Weasel” actually is, if you reap what I’m sowing.
So what did we get out of the deal? Well, we got wet. A lot wet. And we got some new flowers for around the deck in back that I’m assured are just lovely specimens. And we got a bunch of lawn supplies, the better to clutter the remaining eight square inches of our storage area not yet crammed full of crap. And I, personally, got hoodwinked, like a lamb led to slaughter.
But not a lamb led to grilling, because that would require a grill. Which I don’t have. And may never have now, because when my wife brings it up next time, I’m going to assume it’s just a ruse to drag me off to some shoe sale expo or Pantyliners ‘R’ Us, and I’m going to say, “no, thanks”. No thanks, no grill, no wet pansy flowers, and no separating ass from couch until at least Monday morning. Maybe later. Depends on what’s on TV.
Don’t get me wrong. I still want that grill. But the gauntlet’s been thrown. Let’s “look for a grill” no longer means the thing that I think it means. It evidently means getting drenched along with a bunch of green-thumbed goobers who didn’t know enough to stay the hell in the house on a lazy weekend afternoon.
Or they fell into the same trap I did. The call of the flame is powerful, indeed. But the ruse of the wife? Diabolical.
Permalink | No CommentsSo, I mentioned a while back that I’m doing fauxga.
Yeah. I’m not doing fauxga any more.
There are several reasons why. Partly, it was that my initial membership ran out, and I didn’t enjoy it enough to shell out more money to keep doing it. Which is mostly why I stopped going to school, to the doctor and to the tax auditor, too, but it’s only one factor in this case.
Also, it didn’t really fit my style. Which is a tall order for any exercise regimen, frankly — there aren’t a lot of ancient traditions that include a ‘Lounge on Couch Eating Popcorn’ pose. But this one was a little further afield than I was willing to go in the long term. More about that in a moment.
There was also this semantic disconnect that my latent OCD-ness had a hell of a time getting past. The fauxga place billed itself with ‘yoga’ in the name, but my understanding is that yoga ‘proper‘ is an Indian tradition. And this place I went to was founded in Korea. By Koreans. For Koreans, initially. And including an awful lot of Korean words that I couldn’t dream of spelling and could just barely phonetically muddle through when I was supposed to say them.
“When I was supposed to be wishing the other students a long and prosperous life, I was probably actually telling them to shove reconstituted cat food up their rear ends.”
(And frankly, I probably didn’t muddle through them particularly well. When I was supposed to be wishing the other students a long and prosperous life, I was probably actually telling them to shove reconstituted cat food up their rear ends. Or something equally as horrible.
Luckily, none of the other people in the class spoke Korean, either. And they were busy accidentally mangling the same greeting into some outrageous insult involving my grandmother and a spiny anteater. Languages are funny that way. One misplaced syllable and *poof* — it’s all anteaters and grannies and Meow Mix up your Tender Vittles. I’m amazed anyone at the U.N. can still look each other in the eye, frankly.)
Now, I’ve got no opinion on which nation has the more-cornered market on physical fitness and mind-body harmony. It could well be that Korea’s got this whole enlightenment thing covered, and are just waiting for the rest of us to catch up. Or maybe the Indians are ahead of the pack — fifteen million lotus-sitting hippies can’t be all wrong, can they?
Either way, the Korean place calling itself ‘yoga’ left a bad taste in my bhagwan. There’s no way the teachers from the Korean tradition learned enough from their Indian counterparts to rightly call it ‘yoga‘. These people just don’t share information so freely. If they did, you’d be able to get a decent kimchee with your biryani at an Indian restaurant, and the local Korean joints would serve raita and nan with their spicy bulgogi.
But no. And if they’re not going to swap recipes, what chance is there that the path to Nirvana is changing hands? Yogi, please. I’m not buying it.
Mostly, though, my reason for eschewing the fauxga boiled down to what I’d call ‘philosophical differences’. Meaning I had certain philosophical questions about the practice, and the teachers had differences in the sorts of questions they wanted to answer.
(Which is not their fault, to be fair. I did the same thing to my school teachers and doctors and tax auditors, too. In a way, this mutual exasperation thing works out okay. At least all of my breakups are mutual.)
For instance, one instructor was explaining how some particular exercise would increase the flow of qi, or cosmic energy, throughout the body and open any ‘blockages’ where energy might stagnate.
Now, already he’d pretty much lost me. My personal philosophy has room for exactly two sources of pure energy on the planet — direct sunlight and Jolt cola — and if either of those are sloshing freely around my body, then I’ve probably got problems much larger than whether I can bend my foot backwards over my head.
But I’m willing to extend the benefit of the doubt. I don’t have all the answers — hell, I don’t have any of the answers, but sometimes knowing that you don’t know anything is better than knowing something that doesn’t make sense.
(No, that didn’t work on the auditor, either. Man. Tough crowd.)
So I listened carefully to the explanation with the other students, and the instructor asked if we had any questions. A couple of people asked the sort of detailed and practical questions that he was clearly expecting — is the stretch more important, or the body alignment? How long should we hold the pose if we try it at home? Will this tinge my aura green or orange, because I really need to know how to accessorize if I go out afterward?
(I may have made the last question up. But you know somebody was thinking it.)
Eventually, he noticed me sitting quietly in thought — because, “Come try fauxga! Small classes! Personal attention!” — and asked whether I had any questions of my own. As it happened, I did. He smiled and readied himself to offer fine technical points on the subtleties of the current exercise, and its optimal practice for increased well-being, energy flow and gorilla-like virility. Instead, I asked:
‘Do chipmunks have chakras?‘
He didn’t quite get the question. I tried to fill in the gaps between where we were sitting and the left field from whence the query evidently came — in other words, the proverbial ‘show your work‘ from high school trig class.
(And there’s another teacher who didn’t know quite how to answer my goofy tangential questions.
Of course, at the time most of them had to do with using mathematical calculations to help in unhooking pesky bra straps. And that’s clearly an inappropriate use of trigonometry class time.
It’s really more of a ‘differential calculus thing’. Obviously.)
Anyway, I explained, I’ve been thinking. If this ‘cosmic energy’ is really a thing, then it’s falling all over the earth. And if we’re just here along for the ride with all of the other critters and beasts on the planet, then we’re not special — they should be getting some benefit from these rays, too. So if there are all these chakras — which is what I called them to avoid butchering the Korean name for exactly the same things — on our stomach and palms and chest and feet and head, and alignment of things like ‘hips over knees’ or ‘spine curved toward the sky’ are important to keep this energy in balance… then what the hell do jellyfish do about it? Or garter snakes? Or hummingbirds or king salmon or three-legged horses or yes, the chipmunks? Whither the chipmunks, sensei? If cleansing cosmic energy flows out through my palms, but only if I hold a certain excruciating pose for three minutes at a time until my arms go numb, then what’s up with the chipmunk? It crawls and it eats and it poops, all right, but if it’s ever stretched out and straining in all directions like I just was, it’s because the little furball’s just been struck by lightning. And while that ‘cosmic energy’ might be flowing through its palms, it’s probably also leaving exit wounds as it goes. I’m guessing that’s a different kind of thing — when I can feel my arms again, I’ll check it out and let you know.
Suffice it to say that these are not precisely the sorts of questions that a small-studio fauxga teacher ten minutes into a new exercise wants to explore. But for me, as usual, they were just the tip of the iceberg. I had other questions — many, many thousands of other questions — but I didn’t get into those. I mostly let him get back to doing his job of winding us into painful Korean pretzel shapes, but eventually the cognitive disconnect got to me. The ‘cosmic energy’ model is just not something that fits in my worldview — and it’s pretty much all that this fauxga practice was about.
Which doesn’t make it bad, or wrong, or any less successful in matching the proper-colored handbags with post-pose aura hues. But it’s not for me. So I’m looking for something else. Something less… energetic, in a particular sort of sense.
The biggest downside to dropping fauxga, frankly, is the music. In between the new age warmup lilts and a couple of oddly-placed ‘Contorting to the Oldies’-style numbers from the ’50s, the place played some pretty kick-ass tunes. Wild rhythms and relentless drums, mostly instrumentals with tribal or Asian influences — good driving music, or lounging on couch eating popcorn music, or watching chipmunks in lightning storms music. I have no idea what any of the songs were called, or who performed them. I only know that they existed on the iPod kept in the front of the room where the instructors work.
And I’m pretty sure I can’t ask to attend “just one more class, so I can Shazam half your playlist”.
I don’t care what country the practice comes from. They’ll tell me to go shove it up a chipmunk chakra. Pity, that.
Permalink | No CommentsThe world can be a scary place. My goal is to live without fear — or at least without fear being a chief and overwhelming influence in the things that I do.
It’s a nice goal. I think I came up with it one night while I was hiding under the covers, worrying about my job, the economy, natural disasters, terrorism, high-fructose corn syrup, that funny-looking spot on my elbow and the monster under my bed.
(Not necessarily in that order. My elbow and the monster seemed a little more immediate, just at the moment. Your neuroses may vary.)
I’m also interested in helping others to live a fear-free life, when I can be of service. And when it doesn’t take a lot of effort. And mostly for people who are doctors and nurses and such and could tell me if I’m going to die from this spot on my elbow, if they’d just shut up about all their phobias and worries, already.
However. It’s also true that a bit of fear — maybe paranoia, even — is occasionally warranted. As much as I’d like — and I’d like others to like — a fetterless, carefree lifestyle, some fears are probably not such a bad thing, after all.
“It’s possible I haven’t caused her this much pain in one night since the docs yanked me headfirst out of her.”
Take my Mom, for instance.
(Don’t take her far, for cripes sake. It’s Mother’s Day; she’s already tuckered out. Just take her to the ‘for instance’ and back. That’ll do.)
But just for instance, my mother has the occasional fear. Perfectly understandable — it comes with being human.
(Probably also comes with being my mom. Hard to say for sure — very small sample size. And no reliable way to test the hypothesis. There’s simply no way to determine statistically whether being my mother would create more anxiety or worry than being any other person.
I don’t care what she tells you. I’ve seen the chart. Her error bars are through the roof.)
A fair percentage of my mother’s fears have to do with computers. Also understandable, for a mammal of a certain age with opposable thumbs who’s been thrust headlong into the Information Age during the course of her lifetime.
(All the criteria are important, you know. Young children growing up with the interwebs don’t have computer fears. Feudal serfs from the 13th century didn’t worry much over the things. And cats, as a more or less thumbless representative, seem generally unperturbed about computers on the whole. Excluding those who enjoy a good ‘cheezburger’, of course.)
So, my mother has a few computer fears. She’s afraid she’ll hit the wrong key, or delete the wrong file, or plug the wrong cable into the wrong port and somehow scandalously-but-accidentally violate her CPU. And the CD drive will never be able to look her in the eye again. Something like that.
I’ve always tried to encourage her. There’s a whole world out there on the ‘net, I’ve told her. Just take a deep breath and go with it. Explore. Don’t worry. Practice your typing. Draw a picture. Make a spreadsheet. You won’t break anything. It’ll be fine.
(The caveat I’d like to add, but haven’t:
‘Don’t go searching for pairs of girls sharing a single cup or other girls hanging out in tubs or anything to do with how you might use lemons for a party.
For the love of all that cannot be unseen, Mother, do not look for any of those otherwise innocuous-sounding things. But otherwise, except for all the disgusting things I’ve forgotten or haven’t heard of or don’t exist yet, you should be fine.’
I figure she’ll be fine. It’s probably best that there are things on the internet that she doesn’t even know she’s scared of. But I’m just waiting for the day when she runs into something eye-wrenchingly repulsive and it’ll somehow be my fault:
Mom: I saw this… thing. This awful THING. DID YOU KNOW ABOUT THIS THING?!?
Me: Um… yeah. I saw it once.
Mom: HOW COULD YOU NOT TELL ME ABOUT THIS… THING?!
Me: Well, how would I, really? I mean, literally. How should I have described that to you?
Mom: I… don’t know. You could have warned me about the horse. Or the girl with the egg beaters.
Me: Oh, right. Like those matter anyway, once you’ve seen the funnel scene at the end.
Mom: Just… don’t even remind me. It’s so awful.
Me: I know, right? Like curdled milk could even do that. Who knew, right?
Mom: Oof. Stop.
Me: And I’m not eating Jell-O for a while, now. Let me tell you. Or getting an oil change, for that matter.
Mom: Ugh. Just quit talking.
Me: And remember? ‘YAHTZEE!!‘ An entire Hefty bag full, they had. ‘YAHTZEE!!‘
Mom: That’s it; you’re grounded. Forever. Vow of silence. To your room, mister. March!
Hopefully, it’ll never come to that. If it does, I’ll have to feign ignorance of whatever visual nightmare she witnessed. I just hope I won’t turn out to be the one who sent her the link. Yow.)
Anyway, horrifying internet content aside, I’ve encouraged my mother to get herself out there and use the computer and the network as much as she’s willing. And she’s really embraced it over the past few years — she’s paying some bills online, doing research on family history, keeping up via email and more. She’s a regular intertubes whiz — and all because she was able to conquer her fear of doing something wrong.
So it was no great surprise when I called her for Mother’s Day this evening that she’d been on the computer a few moments before, checking out some new info. Unfortunately, she’d hit a little snag. But with the confident, ‘no fear’ attitude about computing that I helped instill in her, she was able to handle it all by herself.
Sort of.
Mom: You know, I was surfing around earlier and got this odd pop-up.
Me: Really? I thought we had those blocked in your browser.
Mom: Yeah, most of them. This one was weird, though — said it came from Windows Security.
Me: It wha, now?
Mom: Windows Security, right in FireFox. It said I had a bunch of viruses or something…
Me: Uh.
Mom: …and did I want it to run a scan of my computer…
Me: Eee.
Mom: …and download a program to get rid of all these viruses on my drive?
Me: Mom. Listen very carefully. Whatever you do, do not click-
Mom: So I clicked on it!
Me: …
Mom: Was that bad?
Me: Um. Yeah.
Mom: Because nothing’s working now. Is my computer horked up?
Me: Pretty horked, yup.
Mom: Horked bad?
Me: Horked like a Jell-O covered horse with a set of egg beaters.
Mom: What?
Me: Nothing. Just something from some movie I’m watching.
To be fair — it is Mother’s Day, after all — the conversation didn’t go exactly like that. Mom’s much savvier in the surfing department than depicted above. And the malware she encountered is an especially sinister little beastie, designed specifically to fool users into thinking the ‘bait screen’ is a Windows Security alert, and that there are already a legion of viruses and worms and Trojan horses scurrying around your hard drive. Instead, those things get injected only if you click the link.
Which, after several attempts to repel the pop-up warnings, she did.
So the exchange above was fanciful. The horking, sadly, is all too real. And now Mom sits with an unusable infested computer on Mother’s Day, and while I can offer help and advice — or at this point, condolences — over the phone, I’m physically several hundred miles away. There’s nothing useful I can do, and the one related thing I’ve tried to do over the past several years — give her less fear and more confidence in wrangling a computer — may have led to the current mess, as well. It’s possible I haven’t caused her this much pain in one night since the docs yanked me headfirst out of her.
Which is to say, uh, Mom — Happy Mother’s Day! Very sorry about the computer. I hope you like the flowers I sent — though they probably won’t help you check Gmail, or pay your cable bill online. Still — they won’t show you disgusting movies or whisk nasty viruses out of the air, either. Something to be said for daisies and tulips now, eh? Henh? Yeah?
Sorry, ma. Hope the rest of your day was great, anyway. (Don’t disown me.)
Love you,
C.
Permalink | No CommentsThere’s nothing like playing adult softball on a Little League field to make you feel like a big man.
I did that very thing earlier tonight. And as I watched one of my hits sail majestically into the gloom and over the same three-foot-tall wall that eleven-year-old girls routinely clear, I felt like a god. Some invincible titan dropped to earth to crush the wills of slowly-pitched softballs and any mere humans who dared stand in my way. It was intoxicating.
“And as I watched one of my hits sail majestically into the gloom and over the same three-foot-tall wall that eleven-year-old girls routinely clear, I felt like a god.”
(And not just ‘swilling beer during softball’ intoxicating. Nor ‘downing beer before softball’ intoxicating, nor ‘pounding beer after softball’ intoxicating. This was new. Powerful. Less bloated and slurry. In a word: different.)
I resolved to recapture this new feeling as often as possible. So I’m making a few changes around the home and office from now on. Here are just a few:
Itty-Bitty Boozing
I’m done drinking beer from bottles, cans or glasses. Normal-people glasses, anyway. From now on, I’ll sip my lagers from shot glasses — like a gargantuan. While everyone else at the bar is holding a pint with their tiny little teacup hands, I’ll be pawing a cold frosty one with my pair of enormous hairy meathooks. And I’ll lord it over the lightweights with my liquor capacity, too:
“Dude — I just had eight glasses of beer while you’ve been sipping the one. Either chug the thing or put a nipple on it, already.”
Also, hard liquor is to come out of airplane bottles only. Downed in one gulp, bottoms up, no hands. That way, I can make my mouth seem bigger, too.
(Yes, I know what I just said. No, you shut up.)
Buying Pants Three Sizes Too Small
I’m halfway there already, apparently. But by going the extra-shrinky mile, I could wind up with jeans that I literally bust out of, Hulk-style.
Of course, the Hulk generally rips his pants around the thighs, and other muscle-y areas. Mine are more likely to give out somewhere in the ass vicinity. Or be the victims of a devastating muffintop shockwave of some kind.
Still — busting out is busting out. This is all about scaring the neighbors and small children, after all. I’m an angry GIANT! RAWR!
Also, please to be ignoring my Valentine heart boxer underpants. They tend to sully the illusion I’m going for here.
Keyboard of the Titans
Also, I’m switching over from using my regular keyboard on the computer to using the comparatively teeny one on my phone. I’ll hook it in wherever I’m typing — sitting in a miniaturized desk chair, if at all possible — and feel like Gulliver pounding out trashy Lilliputian romance novels.
(Because he had a thing for that. Nobody talks about it. But we all know.)
As a matter of fact, I’m switching over right now.
BE3HOLD YUR NEW MaSTRE & WEEEP,. PINY mORTALLS!!!1!
Okay, scratch that one. I’ll sort it out later. You piny mortalls get a reprieve. For now.
Pimp My Crib
Right now, the missus and I share a queen-sized bed. It’s huge; we can practically play Marco Polo in that thing, and never run into each other.
(That’s her excuse, anyway. Zowie!)
But if I slept in something much smaller — like a baby crib, for instance — then I’d feel like a king among men. A man among boys. A boy among insects. And an insect among… well, whatever it is insects feel smugly superior in comparison to, I guess. Slime mold? Bacteria? Matt Dean? You get the idea.
Of course, this is another area in which I’ve had some experience. I lasted maybe a week in a bed six inches too short for me. Two hours locked into the fetal position in a baby cage, and I’d probably be crying for my mommy. Or a Holiday Inn.
Hrm. These ideas seem to be getting worse all the time. You’d think an omnipotent hulking colossus could do better. And yet.
Hang Around Gaggles of Small Children
If I’m standing next to a bunch of four-year-olds — at a preschool recess, say — then I’ll look huge in comparison. That’s a big plus.
On the other hand, there’ll be gaggles of small children about. So I’ll be exposed to several thousand strains of snot-inducing diseases, and have to endure a constant barrage of inane kiddie banter, like:
“Gee, mister, you sure got a lot of nose hair.”
“Those are sure some funny-looking pants. Are you the Muffintop Man?”
“You smell like my daddy after he takes the red-eye home from Las Vegas.”
“Oh, that fence? Yeah, I can totally hit a ball over that fence, too.”
“I don’t know you. I NEED AN ADULT!”
That’s it; this whole thing just isn’t worth it. I’m pouring myself a big-boy glass of tequila and going back to normal-sized bed. Move along, now. THIS IDEA IS OVER!
Permalink | No CommentsFate has once again thrust me into an uncomfortable situation.
(You see that? It’s not me. It’s fate. I’m just an innocent pawn in the constant tomfoolery.
Well, okay. Maybe a bishop. Or one of those little horseys that can’t walk in a straight line. But fate’s running the show. That’s all I’m saying.)
This particular nightmare took a while to develop. Years, frankly. Fate must have an awful lot of free time on nights and weekends to be planning out a screw job this long. I think fate needs to find a hobby, frankly. Fate could knit sock monkeys or something. We’d both be happier.
I digress.
The issue at hand concerns food. Specifically, the shoveling of said food into me while at work. For years, I’ve had a pretty singular strategy for how to deal with eating at the office:
Find greasy joint of dubious nutritional benefit. Order same lunch every day. Eat lunch. Digest. Rinse. Repeat.
“What’s a cafeteria, anyway? All burnt meat and Jell-o and over-sogged tater tots.”
That’s just how it works for me, at least for the past decade or so. As my job has moved me to different locations, I’ve been a ‘lunch regular’ at a sandwich shop, then almost-but-not-quite a Subway, then a lunch truck and for the past couple of years a food court burrito casa. I find a place, zero in on an order, and in a few weeks, voila — it’s a Thing™, and getting lunch is a breeze. They make it while I’m still standing in line, it costs the same every day, and I’m in and out like a flash — which leaves more time in the lunch hour for sobbing quietly under my desk and ruing the day my resume was born.
So everybody wins. And all the gnashing of teeth is good for digestive health, I hear. Or I made it up. Whatever.
Anyway, that’s my M.O. and I’ve been sticking to it for ten years or more. Find the lunch. Eat the lunch. Be the lunch. It’s tasty, quick, predictable and one less decision that I have to futz with in the middle of a workday. I don’t eat breakfast, and I can have any exotic old delicacy I like for dinner. But food at work is like married-people sex: get it over with, be efficient, clean up your mess, check your teeth and get back to whatever it was you were doing.
(Oh, you think it’s an imperfect analogy. But I’ve done both during a staff meeting, and they’re actually pretty comparable. If one didn’t come wrapped in foil with a side of guacamole, I don’t know if I could tell them apart.
You could do worse for an analogy. Trust me.)
This is where fate stepped slowly in to throw a beer-battered onion wrench in my plans. First, I made my latest move at work — out of the building closest to the food court, and next door to another building in the complex. No big deal — those extra steps were just another chunk of carne asada calories worked off on the way to lunch and back.
But then, a few months ago, fate lowered the boom, and opened a brand spanking new cafeteria between the buildings, right on my way to work. And to the food court. And back from the food court. And to meetings in my old building, and on the way back. And, if I wander slightly, on the way to the bathroom.
I still have my ‘lunch buddies’ in the food court. The bond of being a ‘regular’ at a kiosk burrito shack is not broken so lightly.
(Or ever, possibly. I’ve considered that to eat a different weekday lunch in the foreseeable future, I’ll either have to move completely out of the Boston area, or suffer some injury that entails being fed through a tube. Those may be the only options left.
I’m leaning toward the tube. Moving is hard.)
But now the caf’ is there. All the time. Mid-morning. Tea time. When that ‘two-thirty feeling’ starts kicking in at eleven fifteen or so.
I fought it at first. I resisted the lure of the shiny new cafetorium for weeks. What’s a cafeteria, anyway? All burnt meat and Jell-o and over-sogged tater tots.
(See? Aren’t you glad now I already used up the ‘married sex’ analogy?
I told you it could be worse.)
But one day, I needed a Pepsi. All I wanted was a Pepsi. Just a Pepsi! And the place in the food court where I often get them was waaaaay over past the other building.
So gingerly, tentatively I peered around the corner into the cafeteria. I walked past the salad bar — ooh, fresh asparagus. I ignored the snack fridge — but whoa, they have hard-boiled eggs? I made a determined beeline — hey, look, wood-fired pizza — for the soda case — man, that’s a lot of granola bars — to pick up the one thing — that pasta salad looks pretty good — that I’d come for.
And whatever it was, I bet it would go great with this bag of peanuts and the side of mac ‘n’ cheese I just ordered.
The hook was in. And it was bacon-flavored. I never stood a chance.
So now I find myself in that infernal cafeteria, almost every day. Never for lunch — don’t dream of suggesting to the burrito guy that the caf’ could usurp our lunch routine. Because the man has very sharp knives. I’ve seen them.
But mid-morning, maybe one of those eggs or hippie bars would be nice. In the afternoon, again a soda. Got a long meeting? Gonna need something to make that tolerable. Fruit smoothies and Slim Jims count as ‘comfort food’, right? Especially if you dunk, or use the latter as a ‘jerky straw’. That’s totally acceptable behavior somewhere in the world, I bet.
So congratulations, fate. You’ve taken my single midday eating ritual, and spread it into a veritable smorgasbord of near-continuous office noshing. Why not just set up a buffet table outside my office? Huh? Or a slop trough by my keyboard tray, so I don’t even have to leave my desk to stuff my workaday face? Why don’t you do that, fate? Yeah.
(Hey, just in case you make that happen, could I get some of that mac ‘n’ cheese from the caf’ in the trough? Maybe in the three o’clock slopping or so, thanks. That stuff is outstanding.)
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