Channa masala

At some point, you have to take your gym clothes home. Since I’m about to be home for ten days and I got a package of holiday prezzies too (yay!), lunch time was the right time. What’s awesome is that I live like ten minutes from my office and can reheat a genius Trader Joe’s frozen meal and eat it with an episode of SVU and get back in time for a meeting. If there’s a better life out there, I’d like to see it.

 

Spicy chickpeas over arugula

Is my pulse even registering today? I swear, if you saw me kicking through it on Monday you wouldn’t even recognize the me of today. What it took to get me to the fax machine! But apparently you can still get hungry from sitting and reading websites about creepy Santas and bad crafting. I ate the remnants of Monday’s dinner mixed together in a bowl with a fork I don’t recognize. (Where did it come from? Is it yours, L.? Or C.? A.? I think you’re the only three who’ve been at my place all year!) It wasn’t good, but it was lunch, and I expect supersnax at the union holiday party later, so I’m trying to leave room for that.

 

Spicy chickpeas over rice

I can tell a weight’s just been lifted, I’m all warmly fond of everything, of the lemon in these chickpeas, the incoherent maps to the post office (why is googleymaps sending me across the Brooklyn Bridge and back just to get to Cadman Plaza?), this semester’s literary journal, it’s got my classmates and my coworkers and my teachers all in one, and I love it. Did I tell you about when L. and I went and saw my classmates read downtown? Not just no two poems alike but no two names alike, this sure is some place to spend a handful of my years. I know contact with difference doesn’t make all the difference, but it sure makes some. I’ve got other burdens that I’ll add back tomorrow, but for today it’s just the press of this bamboo spoon, this paper really does smell like trees.

 

Quinoa and chickpea salad

I got so cold eating with J. and B. down in the Quizno’s kvetching (really) about the intolerable revision problems with the new APA style guide. Intolerable! You send seven pages of errata and all your sample papers are wrong and you won’t just replace our copies? Also, a flow chart for DOIs? Really? Are you serious with this? It is cold outside, but I didn’t really understand why it was so cold inside until we were leaving and I put my hand down by the vent and discovered that it was blasting more cold air into the room.

 

Quinoa, chickpeas, and some cheese

Heated up a bowl of quinoa and chickpeas with some slices of cheese, watched Ed Hartwell say to Lisa for the first time that he might give up on his football dream. His knee just isn’t getting better. That’s so intense, when you realize something you always wanted just isn’t going to happen. Poor Ed.

 

Red lentil and chickpea soup

I ate the last of the soup in my cloffice with my beloved and well-secured bamboo spoon and read the opening of my next Dennis Lehane book (downloaded via Whispernet to my Kindle, which is awesome). Love this guy. So easy to read, just flip flip flip, no effort at all, great plot, cliffhangers throughout, surprises, etc., mindless genre fiction that’s well written enough that I’m not embarrassed by the sentences. (I’m looking at you, Dean Koontz.) I’m all out of balance, unreasonably anxious, sleepless, so was grateful for the teaser of a prologue–What happened to Angie that he can’t think about her? Who’s Grace? Why the beard? Will he really never detect again?

 

Lettuce, chickpea, and quinoa salad

I lost my bamboo fork. Despair. It must have bounced out when I went wrangling for my Metrocard. Maybe it’s still at home on the counter. Maybe. I don’t know. But I went and asked A. if rumors were true, that she keeps a stash of plastic forks somewhere in her cube. She looked at me. Opened the door of the cabinet above her desk. Plunged her fist into the darkness. Rustled. Wrangled. And pulled out a plastic spoon and fork set. The spoon is white with a white plastic ghost for the handle while the fork is black with, M. and I decided as we ate kvetching and catching up at a table in the courtyard, some kind of haunted witch-hat-wearing jack o’ lantern handle that would fit better in a much smaller hand. Because I know you take care of your things, said A. as she handed them to me conspiratorially. I didn’t have the heart to inform her otherwise.

 

Quinoa, chickpeas, and arugula salad

I took a break from copyediting this totally depressing article about the militarization of anthropology in the wake of the war on terror to give some undivided attention to the second quarter of the Jets game over a plate of Friday’s leftovers. Wish Sanchez’s guns had been a’blazin’ like they were in the first quarter. In other words, can’t stop thinking about war.

 

Quinoa, chickpeas, and arugula salad

You know what’s great? Little bit of lemon, squeezed over everything. Just so refreshing. I loaded up a plate, ate in front of an episode of Top Chef, so glad I wasn’t eating that deconstructed chowder flan.

 

Spicy chickpeas over rice, redux

I can’t recall the last time I ate lunch in my cloffice without loading and reloading my email at least just a little bit. It must have been back in 1998, when Out had like one computer and an AOL account and we did all our factchecking with phone books. I used to, like, call the Ugandan embassy if I had a question about the capital city. It was madness. But with the network down, that’s what I did, staring at the revision I finished during my desk shift, wondering how I would ever get a copy of it from the reference desk machine over to my cloffice computer so I could add a bibliography before hitting print. I held the paper next to the monitor. No magic. And then I remembered back when I first got here and everybody was using these new-fangled thumb driveys so I got one to be with the in crowd and was puzzled: why don’t you guys just upload it all to Google Docs? Well, I guess that’s why. S. and J. made fun of me at the desk, face full of chickpeas, garbling out where do I put this again?