highs and lows of unemployment dining

Thursday, mar. 4, 2004   |   0 comments

I’ve finally found the key to happy unemployment. Ready? It’s all about putting the right foods in your mouth hole.

On Saturday night I was lavished with the best steak dinners ever. We started out with a tower of onion rings and one of those fantasterrific wedges of iceberg lettuce, then we had some cows and potatoes and wine. When the nice yet towering, reserved, and mortician-y waiter brought us dessert menus at the end of it all, I was too full even to take in the words … it actually pained me to read about the bread puddings and chocolate bombs. Incredible, but true.

After soaring to such heights, my stomach fared considerably less glamorously on Monday, my first official day of unemployment. The entire day was burned on waiting around — teeth unbrushed, pajamas unshed, stomach fed nothing but refrigerator scraps — for Fed Ex to deliver what I thought was a big tsunami severance check but which turned out to be, when the stupid, slender envelope finally arrived at FOUR PM, just two weird little checks written out for puzzlingly unfamiliar amounts.

I tried to make use of my imprisonment and finally get on top of the obscene amounts of Nabokov I have to plow through for school, but every time I cracked the book, within moments I was asleep. After spending an hour languishing in a grey and selfdisgusted semiconsciousness, I would struggle my way awake enough to pick up the book, so heavy, and try again. But nono.

By the time the package arrived, the sky was darkening, and just like that, it was nighttime and I hadn’t even left the house yet. The day left me feeling so groggy and drugged, I halfway convinced myself that I was getting the flu, maybe? And then I accidentally watched The Lizzie McGuire Movie and it became clear that my sickness was of a completely different nature. And then I went and punished myself by throwing tacos at my stomach. Hard.

Tuesday was slightly better, but it felt disconcertingly like work. I went out to vote (Just when I thought I couldn’t love my Sidekick more, I discovered that I can load the Guardian’s lazy voter cheatsheet on it!); then I took an endless bus ride helmed by a timid driver-in-training who kept blowing past stops and cutting corners too sharply and trapping cars and getting screamed and honked at, over and over; then I sat through two 2.75-hour lectures; and then, when I got home at ten thirty, I ate a frantic meal of olives and ice cream and one boiled egg and fell asleep.

But yesterday, finally, I got into the swing of unemployment. After sipping a leisurely parade of coffees, I finished up some PokerSavvy editing, then I walked to the gym where Justin and BeeEyeGee and Prince and I rode the trotter for like two miles (the stroll that got me to there was longer than the workout itself, but so?), then I tortured my body parts with a variety of mean devices, then I took myself out for some late-lunch sushi — three different vegetable rolls, miso, and tea, all for just seven dollars! — then I came home and bathed, napped, and US Weeklyed until Shree got here and took me out for crazy-good emerald noodles.

And tonight cute and toned-assed Liz is taking me out for some Slanted Door. I am the lucky owner of a very lucky stomach!

PS: I just got an idea, and maybe I stole this, probably I did, but … unemploymints. Possible taglines include: Put your mouth to work! Or, Keeping your mouth fresh is all the job you need! Or just, The best job never!