A whole pie and a pink lemonade

Have you ever left a restaurant during that tiny period of time after you’ve ordered your drinks but before the waitress has brought them? I have, plenty of times. I call it the soda-break-break and I actually feel pretty bad about it.

I remind myself frequently that it is not a case of the fabled “dining and dashing,” but instead a last minute choice to eat elsewhere. And I earnestly regret that the restaurant is out a few sodas (I won’t go into my theory about how soda is the best and cheapest liquid in the world here, because that won’t win my any sympathy points). But my real guilt comes from imagining the confusion of the waitress when she (yes, she, I’m being sexist today) returns. I also feel very sneaky rushing away from the table with my head down, shoulders slumped, giving a furtive “thanks” to the hostess, even though I am fairly certain that this practice is not illegal just in bad taste.

You might ask why I am doing this so frequently if I am aware that it is in bad taste. (On a side note, is eating out in bad taste these days? With all of those calorie lists on tables I’m not certain.) Last minute regret-driven decisions are just one of the many fantastic bad habits inherent in being indecisive.

Indecisive behavior is particularly cumbersome when dealing with restaurants and eating because it can be so easily shielded by a pretend politeness. No one wants to venture a food type and when the issue is decided, everyone wants to drive there. I am personally a master of the “I don’t care. What do you feel like eating?” line even when my soul earns for a burrito.

I suspect that you are thinking that while this is all well and good, repressing one’s desire for a burrito is not a crime equal to the soda-break-break. And I agree, the two are not equal. But the soda-break-break is an escalated version of the indecisive choosing conversation.

The break generally occurs on occasions when you have been seated and you know the moment that you sit down that you made the wrong choice. Anything could bring about this realization but my queries have revealed expensive food, loud kids, and a bitchy hostess with gauged ears as the main contenders.

For example, my personal-person and I were seated once in a Marie Calendar’s in some shopping mall somewhere. The moment that our asses hit the cold plastic booth it was as though a switch had been thrown. We suddenly saw the restaurant as it really was: cold, depressing, and filled with church-goers wanting the breakfast buffet at 2:20 in the afternoon. I stared in horror at an old man sitting alone a few booths away eating a whole pie and drinking pink lemonade. Not even cornbread could persuade me to stay.

We asked for two cokes, and when the waitress wasn’t looking, we made a soda-break-break.

In which I sink to my lowest point and mock the elderly

I guess I have your regular string of fears for a quasi-[ex]professional young person. I can lay claim to the obvious ones, fear of economic demise, creative failure, getting the cubicle version of bedsores and the like. But I have a unique cultural paranoia to throw into the mix, one which occurred to me last night as I attempted to do yoga (!). I’m rather afraid of becoming a hippie.

And the real cincher is that I like hippies! I have plenty of friends who are, or who convincingly imitate, hippies. Your stereotypical hippie, in my estimation, believes in these things: peace, love, recreational use of the ‘softer’ drugs, and nature. What’s not to love about all that? As a nearly confirmed pacifist I can think of little in their ideology that is off-putting. Sure, there are some hippies that could use a shower, but the same can be said about most children and practically all of the elderly, regardless of whether they are metaphorical draft-dodgers.

To leave off making fun of the elderly (a level I thought that I would never sink to), I will return to the tale of my yoga experience. I have been considering yoga as a possible countermeasure to stress for some time, but was deterred by the mental image the practice provoked. Alarmingly, this image was not of some bare-chested hippie on a cleanly mowed lawn, but rather of your average soccer mom or Uggs-girl, clad in black work out pants and with a yoga mat swinging casually over their arm.

These yoga mats have the same alienating quality that portfolio folders give to art students; these items provide a sense of purpose and accomplishment that those of us without props can’t exude. But unlike art students, these yoga ladies did not impress me. Instead I began to see yoga mats as a yuppie identifier, a sort of hyper-visible fondness for Jack Johnson.

“Yuppies,” I would think, laughing to myself. “Yuppies and their silly fitness.”

But recent discussions about yoga with various parties dissuaded me from this imagery so I decided to give it a go. I will spare you all of the gory details about my lack of balance, strength, and coordination, and get straight to the point of interest (should one indeed exist). Last night around eleven, alone in my front room, I was almost too embarrassed to try to sense any “energy” moving through my body. Because in my small and provincial mind, this was too hippie-like for a sensible, anti-spiritual person like myself.

Scope this dated reference out: In describing this, I feel like Robin Williams in Hook, when he can’t eat the imaginary food because he is a stodgy lawyer who doesn’t believe in imagination. This is, as a matter of pure trivia, my favorite scene from that movie owing to the complete ridiculousness of the food when it does appear. When dinner is left to the imagination, it would appear that the result is merely colored goo.

This is not a vomit story

I think that it is real pleasant when people call television shows “programs.” This is an excellent tactic for worming your way into my affections during casual conversation.

Also, I am prematurely and rapturously excited about Thanksgiving. I was raised to be very gluttonous around the holidays and Thanksgiving is prime pie chow-time. I spend most of the day stuffing my face with deviled eggs and avoiding awkward conversations that start with “How’s school going?” I guess now that I’m graduated, they will all be “Have a job yet?” questions. I will mumble about bad economic conditions and repel questioners with my paprika breath.

Last Thanksgiving I had the mad stomach flu. I never really get stomach-type illness, but this was wretched. I couldn’t eat more than one mouthful of mashed potatoes and was sick for the next three days. At the time I was house-sitting for a good pal of mine (HI TORI!) and it was only her charming cable television that saved me. That and the plain oatmeal and telephone sympathy (during gross vomit-description conversations) furnished by my main fellow.

I wish I had thought at the time to call the junk I was TIVO-ing “programs.” I would have been consoled.

I went as a pseudo-intellectual for Halloween

Today I had the top of a muffin for breakfast and I must admit that it was very tasty. It reminded me very much of the time of my life when everyone I knew was a barista and I ate millions of muffin-tops off day-old pastries. Blueberry muffins with the crumbly junk on top were always my favorite.

The second reason that I found the muffin very satisfying is that it came from a bakery and I have very ambitious feelings about bakeries. To be clear, it’s not that I like coffee shops overmuch. Nope, I’ve never been one to patronize coffee shops, even though I love to loiter with what I might call a delightful decaf-coffee-bev. Probably I’m just afraid that someone will call me a pseudo-intellectual when I hang out in coffee shops looking pensive, and since I am a pseudo-intellectual I don’t want anyone to blow my cover.

Anyway, I like bakeries because when I imagine myself I like to think that I am the sort of person who frequents bakeries. I try to believe that this is just because I am naturally nostalgic and I like small business and quaint things and I definitely love bread. But it’s possible that I’m just lying to myself.

Maybe this is a product of Hollywood. Imagine for me (look how bossy I am, regardless of national holidays like Veteran’s Day) the beginning of some unlikely love story movie.

The likeable and endearingly loopy character surely stops at a bakery during the opening sequence and the bakeristas will know his or her (her or John Cussack) by name. Peppy music will fade, he/she will jovially get the “regular” donut and coffee bev combo and pleasantries will be exchanged.

Now, you might think that this is used to create juxtaposition with the other, more uptight character (who will probably be trash-talking a cabby while drinking a raw egg for breakfast) so that we know exactly how unlikely the love affair will be.

Really, though, I think Hollywood is trying to tell us that people who go to bakeries are plenty more charming than people who drink raw egg protein drinks while looking at their Rolex. And I’ve never known them to lie before.

I see what you mean, however,

I made a relatively well-received Roots joke today. My only wish is that it were a reference to the novel and not the movie, not for reasons of intellectual integrity or a desire to see the purity of the written word furthered, but simply because I think the only thing harder to make a joke about in the early morning than Roots is Roots.

I made this joke in my discussion class this morning, a weekly three-hour marathon of early colonial one-up-manship. The format of this class is prolonged scoffing, as we all get our colonial ire up over how Puritan the Puritans really were, and take great joy in coughing politely and saying things like “I see what you mean, however…”

Being a total freak for colonial America, I get into a real tizzy over this class and pester all close friends and associates with stories of how in Puritan New England you could get the axe for bestiality if your pig birthed a baby pig that resembled you. I am additionally fond of this class because it allowed me to witness a young man moved almost to tears by his love for President Andrew Jackson (a love that seemed entirely based on the supposed ability of the prez to vomit blood on command).

Beyond this, however, I quite resent the habit of people in that class of staring earnestly into your eyes as if to convince you by force of will that their opinion on Goodwife So-and-So is really heartfelt and valid. These people don’t seem to understand that no one appreciates a face-stare; we are all just here to talk about how the Puritans favored the pumpkin as God’s elected fruit.

On a completely unrelated note, I am typing this from my workplace, and in the waiting-room sits a woman entirely unperturbed by the fact that she has a cigarette stuck behind her ear. What a greaser.