A monday without fanfare

I think I burned out on food over the weekend. The things I ate yesterday are barely worth mentioning. When I have a really good meal, I get this feeling for a few days where, if I'm not eating something amazing, I'd just rather not eat all all. Microvaved hot dogs in tortillas just will not cut it. It's got to be flame-grilled brats with mustard and kraut on long deli rolls or I'd rather just be hungry. This is what I get for growing up in a family of cooks; I get spoiled.

So yesterday my appetite was being a brat, but I managed to force breakfast down. I woke up at 8AM and had to nudge the chronological Venn diagram of "Making Breakfast:Taking a Shower" so far over each other that you could use the slivers of single-value space to floss with, figuratively, not literally. There was no time to actually floss. I just had to toss a Jeno's in the oven while I showered and try to get wet, soapy, not soapy and then dry fast enough to take the pizza out of the oven before it was charred beyond my means to digest it.

I pretty much succeeded at this, and even managed to get dressed with a tie and everything and get to work on time, pizza, banana and chocolate cup cake in tow. I did not manage to pack anything for lunch, though. I decided I'd buy something in the area if I had to, but my workplace has a daily average 60% chance of free food, so I wasn't too worried about it.

And aren't ties great? I chose to wear it largely because it was already tied and hanging on the same hangar as the first dress shirt I grabbed out of my closet. I thought, "I'm going to rush to work and probably look a mess when I get there, so I might as well look a professional mess instead of a slacker mess."

It did help aleviate some feelings of shame as I went into the faculty lounge to sneak a cup of coffee. Looking more like faculty than students, I didn't worry about stirring up any vitriol over coffee machine clearance.

You see, there are two coffee machines I can use for free here. One of them is a Flavia and one is a Green Mountain Coffee Co. Both are instant coffee in little pouches that get infused and squirted into your cup with no real brewing involved for the last few months of it's life. Maybe it's just because Flavia machines are everywhere and I've had all of their "coffee" "flavors" at least twice and find most of them appalling, but I prefer the Green Mountain coffee. This machine, however, is in a locked faculty lounge, as opposed to just open on the 4th floor like the Flavia machine. Also, the Flavia machine requires that I get these quarter-sized drink tokens from other full-time employees in the department, so I feel a bit like an itinerant beggar. With the Green Mountain coffee I have access to a key to that room as part of my job. My supervisor has told me I'm allowed to drink whatever coffee I want. Why should I feel guilty drinking the Green Mountain Coffee? Probably because I was raised Catholic. It may also be in part due to the way the other people in my department refer to the Green Mountain Coffee machine. I get the feeling there is some departmental animosity over the inception of that machine that has since been spackled and painted over. You wouldn't know it from a casual viewing of the living room, but from the occaisional eye-tick towards that uneven part of the wall, you notice the spot where daddy punched through the wall after mommy and you went to grandma's for a few months.

So yesterday I had a cup of the Green Mountain Columbian with two creamers. It wasn't bad for coffee that had been sand just seconds before.

Over the course of the morning I had the Jeno's pizza, a combination pizza since the local was out of supreme. It was a touch dark but still very edible. Then I had a banana and tried to eat the cupcake. This proved difficult, though. You'd think I'd have learned not to put cupcakes in my bag, especially with the bike lock rumbling around in there on the way to work. I would not be put off, though. The smell of chocolate cupcake and banana had been driving me crazy all morning. I could get to the banana easily enough, but attempts to remove the cupcake from it's ziplock bag resulted in covering my hand in icing past the knuckles without getting ahold of much cupcake. I went to the cafeteria and got a spoon. Upon my return to my cubicle, my tongue errupted in a fanfare of triumph as the cupcake mournfully resigned to it's Alamo-like fate. It did a valiant job of putting up a pretty effective icing screen, but once I got the paper wrapper out, it was all but over. I don't know how much of my enjoyment came from the actual cupcake and how much came from the problem-solving involved in getting as much of the icing as possible out of the bag and into my mouth, but man, that was a good cupcake. Many thanks to my friend from Philadelphia who brought me the cupcake as left-overs from her niece's 1st birthday party.
It's rather odd that I've now written about cupcakes twice in three weeks, as I feel like I never really eat cupcakes. Before the last one in my blog, I think the last cupcake I ate was last September during the Austin City Limits festival. I'm not really a cupcake kind of guy. I'll eat the occaisional muffin, but even then I'm more of a croissant or bagel person.

I think what I'm saying is: please don't mail me cupcakes. I mean, I'll eat them if you do, and then I guess I'll have to write about them here, but if you really want to get mentioned on my blog for your 15 minutes of unfamy, I would prefer that you mailed me a fruit roll-up. I have not eaten a fruit roll-up in over ten years and I am not sure if they even still make them, but go ahead and mail me a fruit roll-up. I dare you.

Lunch was indeed free, much to the chagrin of Robert A. Heinlein. Well, I am working here so I suppose that I worked for it, but really, I could be working somewhere else, probably working harder than I do here, and they would not provide me with free lunch or even treat me with any sort of respect or dignity. Setting pizzas on a counter with plates and sodas and being told please and thank you is a small price to pay for two slices of pizza.

The pizzas weren't bad, but for the price we ordered them for, it was a bit ridiculous. It sparked my officemate to get into a rant about the falling quality of pizza in the city. I really am not qualified to give an opinion on quality over time, but based on quality versus hype, the pies in this town are not all they're cracked up to be. I'm open to attempts to change my mind, though.

After I finished the pizza I really didn't eat much of anything else yesterday. When I got home I didn't feel like eating right away, and then before very long it was after 9PM and I hadn't eaten more than a handful of potato chips. I didn't want to eat anything too big and then go right to sleep, but nothing small was appealing, so I had a few tortilla chips with some tomatillo/cilantro salsa just to have eaten something possibly providing nutritional value.

I pretty much skipped dinner, though, and it was very strange to not feel like eating. It felt almost as strange as writing a whole blog without a run-on sentence that lasts more than four clauses.