Vegetable soup, redux

My body all-out resisted homework this week. I know, I know, I’ve got a narrative of control going too, but my brain simply would not stay put between the pages of this rhetoric textbook. Enlightenment thought? Pssh. Next! But when a paper is due, a paper is due, so I buckled down (mostly) and hammered this thing out, skimming and drifting and figuring there’s probably something valuable in experiencing the wall-hitting that afflicts most of the students who shambled up to me during my desk shift earlier, haggard and with dread, begging for just one more article, please!

 

Cheese sandwich, redux

I ate another cheese sandwich, this time checking my new haircut with K. and L. on Googleyvideochat. Is it too long in the back? Is it?

 

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?

 

Tomato and black bean quinoa salad, redux

I gave up a lot when I left my old place of business–the Flik chocolate chip cookies, my best work friend, a certain limited sense of home. But look what I gained: the ability to run home at lunch time, drop off a stack of books and yesterday’s lunch dishes, gobble down the remains of the quinoa salad from the fridge while catching a few minutes of Jim Gaffigan on the DVR (I love to laff), scratch the cat and change his food and water, grab the mail, run to the pharmacy to pick up the prescription that has been sitting there since June 9, and get back to my office in just a hair over an hour. Really, it’s just amazing. Plus, if you look down Washington Ave. from just off Eastern Parkway, the gathering storm clouds look like they’re about to gobble lower Manhattan, which is pretty cool too.

 

Salad redux

You know what I love? Mushrooms. I love them in pastas and in salads and in omelettes, cooked and raw, white and button and portobello and funny-looking and foraged. If I had all the leisure in the world this summer, I’d teach myself about mushrooms, tasting as many I could get my mouth around. I’m thinking of asking for that for my birthday: a mushroom dinner, with mushrooms in everything. (Hold that funny marzipan mushroom on the yule log, please.) I don’t know that this was always the case, that I liked mushrooms as much as I do, but it’s true right now in the present, and I think that’s about all we got. That’s what I thought about as I forked down the baby portobellos from the supermarket on the corner, taking up practically half my salad bowl.

 

Cheese and avocado sandwich, redux

I finally finished the sweeping and the mopping and sat myself down for a good long break, just me and the week’s Gossip Girl and the end of the sandwich fixings in the refrigerator. It’s an oppressively beautiful day out today, the kind that makes staying inside very nearly a criminal act. What can I say. Enough, enough, enough. I cannot count the number of Sundays I’ve passed in precisely this manner, though often it’s football I turn on while the floors dry.

 

Ham and cheese sandwich redux

I finished the end of my chips, feeling poor poor me after so much Quizno’s in a row (making food at home is what I ended up dropping this week, sad) when K. googleychatted to say I should tune her in on Skype. So I gamely turned on my computalator and typed in my passwords and got in through the proxy and double-clicked on the Skypicon and listened to the brring! brring! and then what should appear on my screen? K.! Eating McNuggets! One after the other! Dipped in sauce! Ever since my unfortunate counter-pounding incident a few weeks ago (no four-piece?! this is a disaster! a disaster!) I’ve been bemoaning the loss of the dollar menu four-piece and its instant nostalgic comfort. To have my lack thrown in my face that way, to be silently mocked by her slow and satisfied chewing, well. I was in stitches!

 

Red lentils with lime over rice, redux

I meant to read a little further into the play for next week. I meant to browse through the rest of my magazine so I could throw it away. I meant to print out some handouts for class tonight. And if I wasn’t going to do any of that, I certainly meant to tap out the first few sentences toward the thing that was due three weeks ago now. But I listened to music instead and browsed through my Google Reader and loaded and reloaded my Facebook page and giggled at your text messages and mine and filled out a couple of interlibrary loan requests and read about Jason’s ex-wife and was generally bouncy and distracted and impatient for whatever’s coming next.

 

Cheese sandwich, a yogurt, and a banana, redux

It’s sitting up there on top of my file cabinet, laying open and flat on its two-inch spine, thick silver rings clawing up toward my fluorescents, ready to snatch the next set of three-hole-punched papers I can wrangle together out of the last three months and place in correct order for my review committee. We spent the morning together and took a break for lunch so I could eat my sandwich with one hand and my yogurt with a plastic fork I found in the basket by the sink. Eyeing it warily out of the corner of my right eye, up there on top of my file cabinet, I cast about for some other, brighter thing I might settle into for a minute instead. I picked you. Yeah, you.

 

Spicy chickpeas with tomato over rice, redux, plus half a coconut muffin

While my chickpeas went round and round in the microwave I sneaked around the corner and nabbed the last remaining coconut muffin half from the student worker holiday party spread in tech services. I put it on a plate and everything, intending to save it until after my lunch because I’m your basic gratification-delay-machine. But coconut muffin! I totally lost it on the muffin, jamming the thing down my gullet as fast as I could with two minutes still left on the microwave, I guess I’m in more of a now now now kind of mood, leaving me in unseemly mid-gobble when C. came around the corner and waved Hey. I answered back with a cheerful, indecipherable! I ate the rest of my chickpeas back in my cloffice, listening to my paper-writing soundtrack and remembering college, probably with more fond-feeling than is merited.