Red lentil soup with lime

A totally reliable go-to that produces gallons and freezes like a charm. That’s my sell on the red lentil dish. L. made it over the weekend; K. made it last night. I thawed a dish of L.’s version–soupier than mine!–and ate it appreciatively in my closet, talking to D. on the phone about weekends, holidays, and the lecture on Thursday.

 

Curried red lentils with squash over rice

I’ve got too much homework to do, primarily because I didn’t do it earlier, so I had to spend lunch in my cloffice spooning lentils down my gullet while pulling out supporting textual evidence for the argument I want to make in tonight’s class presentation. I had a hard time thinking it through. Something about aporias and terror and stories and murder. Or something. Needless to say, I would rather have been loading and reloading Facebook. (And admittedly I did some of that too.)

 

Curried red lentils with squash over rice

I was told by a professor recently that what he liked about my library session was my efficiency of language, how pared down and nothin’ but the news my standard library resource spiel has become. It’s gotta be–there’s just so much we have to do, and not enough time! Time time time! I feel like that Alice in Wonderland rabbit with that giant clock around his neck these days, totally obsessed with my minute hands. I thought about that as I sat and ate and read this column about time management, wondering if a week or two of time-mapping might help me stop watching hours and hours of crime TV and start getting the smell off the roses that are surely all around me.

 

Red lentils with lime

Does every house have a room like this one, the hallway off the instruction labs, a dumping ground for everything we needed once but can’t throw away yet because we figure we ought to hold onto it who knows if we’ll need it again? This pile of decade-old monitors? These boxes of invoices from 1975? I stood on the imperiled last patch of clear floor and watched M. finish up with a student, my arms full of unused handouts and worksheets, telling myself to just heat up the thawed lentils and eat them, and then that’s what I did.

 

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?

 

Lentils with onions

I love onions. I love L. L. packed me a container of lentils with onions for lunch today. Love! I ate them in my cloffice with this absurdly satisfying bamboo fork L. also gave me. I don’t know what it is about the curve, cut, heft, mouthfeel–sometimes I just want to eat the whole fork. Since I was enjoying lunch in my cloffice between meetings, the latter involving discussion among a very large, contentious group about proposed union givebacks, it was nice to have these little, sensory reminders of other stuff in my life that counts, every scoop of lentils like metadata of my heart.

 

Red lentils with lime over rice

I see how it happens, how you start out all bright-eyed with your new notebook and your new pencils and a little skip in your step because who doesn’t love to learn new things in a group, and then how you end up hunched over in the half light, rigidly reading only what was assigned in class, the Plato, the Bolano, tuned out completely to Kanye and Joe Wilson and Serena and Sanchez’s first game and the further ignominious decline of the once-storied Notre Dame program. It happens if you don’t spend at least some of your lunch hours in your cloffice, browsing the Times and your Google Reader, doing your part to continue in the present tense.

 

Red lentils with lime

I usually use the bamboo fork because I’m eating salads or foods with chunks, aka chickpeas. But today’s soft lentils begged for the spoon–I ran out of rice, so they’re over nothing, making this more like a soup than anything else. I like the spoon. It’s a pleasant shape, quite broad and flat, almost like a paddle with just the palest dip. I ate with my head down, doing a little more waiting than I’d like to admit.

 

Red lentils with lime over rice

I told Henry the IV Part One exeunt! for an hour and heated up the last of the lentils and ate on the couch watching Jockeys on my DVR. I still can’t believe I haven’t been to Santa Anita. One of the travesties of my life so far.

 

Red lentils with lime over rice

K. called right in the middle of my bowl of lentils and asked my very favorite question: What are you doing right now? I mean, exactly right now, exactly what are you doing. The answer was, laying on the couch under a blanket, eating thawed and reheated lentils over rice, watching the finale of the Housewives of Orange County because my super finally left after an hour of futzing with the toilet, which I think isn’t running anymore. I think. I’m usually half-joking when I express some impassioned feeling about a character on reality television. (As much as I was sorry to see Jillian go on Monday, it’s not like I felt the injustice in my bones. Mostly.) This is not the case with regard to Tamra and Vicki, who are monstrous, just monstrous, really just the worst kind of people. I can’t wait until next season already.