Avocado sandwich and a banana

Since my day consists of about forty unscheduled minutes between the hours of noon and 9pm, I took twenty of them to think really hard about my avocado sandwich. I love avocados so much. If I ate local like I’m supposed to, I’d never get to eat avocados, unless I moved to California, and I tried that already and it didn’t suit me.  Then I ate my banana. Did you know that I like my bananas much greener than either D. or L.? I didn’t even realize I was eating them early until the last few months when both have noted on separate occasions that I was eating bananas too early and/or throwing perfectly good bananas into the garbage can as if they were spoiled. It’s like when I learned late in life that wearing my watch on my right hand signaled to the world that I was a lefty. I’ve since disciplined myself, and am wearing my watch right today. The bananas are probably next.

 

Cheese sandwich and a banana

I bought a new jar of mustard at the grocery store today. The label promised it would be extra hot. I still slathered it on since extra hot on a label at my grocery store really only means it might taste like a little something. I also bought some romaine lettuce. When I washed it in my salad spinner, a fly came floating up to the top of the water. I ate in front of the Miami–New England game, wishing the Jets were playing instead. Who invented the bye week?

 

Peanut butter and jam sandwich, plus banana

What’s great about being an adult is that you can fact check your hazy memories of youth and gain valuable corrections from the people who were there with you. Like, I made our lunches every morning in the dark, peanut butter and jam sandwiches until we graduated from high school. K. helpfully pointed out that I did not in fact make us lunch. I made me lunch, one sandwich, and cut it in half and we split that. Add another decade of weekly appointments with Dr. T., plzkthx.

 

Chicken sandwich and a banana

That cup of coffee I had at 10:30 with S.? Yeah. It ended up lasting for more than ninety minutes. Ninety minutes. Amazing. Considering it took three months for us to find a mutually agreeable time for coffee, I guess we had a lot to talk about. But it did represent a significant slice of my lunch hour, which I spent hurriedly gobbling leftovers from last night’s dinner with L., which was most certainly not the last meal I’ll share with her before she heads to Cleveland to move in with her fiance. Nope. That wasn’t the last meal I’ll share with my oldest friend in New York before she moves a thousand miles away. I won’t believe it.

 

White bean and arugala salad, plus a banana

You know how when you’re out in the country for the first time in a long time and the lights go out and you hunker down thinking you’re about to sleep better than ever because there won’t be any sirens or reggaeton or feral, mating cats but actually you can’t get to sleep at all because the silence builds to such a hum in your ears that you’d almost rather a block party so you can get some flippin’ shuteye? The library noise at the end of my shift had built to such a din, it was all I could hear, I started to lose it. Grouchy and having approached a table with the objectless threat If I have to come over here one more time, I determined we’d all be best served if I shut myself up in my cloffice with my dish and my fork and a good long blank stare at the wall.

 

Peanut butter and jam sandwich, banana, baby carrots, and goldfish crackers

You know what would be good for lunch? I asked as I sat in my chair and took photos of my feet against the trees in between reading pages of my genre paperback while L. put together the tent and air mattress and unloaded food and generally did everything that would make life possible for the next three days. A peanut butter sandwich. So that’s what the long suffering L. made me, with crackers and carrots in the little compartments in our plastic dollar store plates.

 

Spinach salad and a banana

I sat in my cloffice with the door closed and eked out the very last seconds of this spinach. If I’m honest with myself, I have to admit it had pretty much turned already, tell-tale dark green around too many edges. Still, it was good enough with chickpeas and feta and doused with olive oil and vinegar that leaked out of the container into a plastic bag on my way to work this morning. As I ate I chit-chatted with K. on googleychat (where have you been?!?) and paged through the White House photostream on Flickr. I love the White House photostream, especially the shots of the president just looking like a normal guy. His escalation of war in Afghanistan and weird affirmation of DOMA bum me out (among plenty of other bummers), but it’s so nice to have a president who appears at least human.

 

Salad, plus banana

I’ve been having trouble getting up and down my stairs with ease, due largely to my decision to replace personal fitness with eating candy and fretting about deadlines. I wheeze. Sometimes my knees hurt. I’m too young for this. So I nagged myself into the gym where I received helpful confirmation of my reduced endurance and lung capacity. Feeling too much like that one time K. and I were lapped and then lapped again in the mile at a junior high track meet,  I returned, hanging my head, to eat my salad in my cloffice while  formatting somebody else’s citations. I wonder if I would have gotten myself out of Idaho anyway, even without trying to get A Sport onto my college applications?

 

Peanut butter and blueberry jam sandwich, banana, and the rest of the grapes

I cued up the week’s Gossip Girl to eat with lunch and zomg! there was a whole riff on having lots of different kinds of jam! I knew I was rich. I was right to save the blueberry for last–subtle, not too sweet, tastes like blueberries. The jar I bought is so so cute because it’s small, but that also means it’s almost gone. The sandwich took the last of the peanut butter, that was the last banana, and those were the last grapes, browning a little where they attached to the stalks.

 

Peanut butter and blackberry jam sandwich and a banana

I work in a library so I shouldn’t be surprised and yet: Why are there all these books on my desk! Seriously! So many books I barely have an empty inch upon which to rudely rest my elbows while I gnaw at my sandwich, toasted this morning, half of it the heel of the loaf so it’s a little tough. I’ve got textbooks and collected works and Shakespeare paperbacks and interlibrary loan books for coursework and tenure-getting work and this misnomered stack: “just for fun.” And then this stack of galleys for the summer homosexual books roundup, a good half of which are described by publicists as in the tradition of David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs. C’mon guys. Can’t we talk about anything but ourselves? And our lunch?