DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

The company nondemoninational holiday event ended up at a thoroughly demoninational restaurant: TGI Friday’s, home-away-from-home to poultry farmers and cattlemen and probably those ranch hands with tall boots and fat belt buckles who electrocute cows at the front door to the slaughterhouse. The menu even has an Atkins page.

Five of the six “salads” contain chicken, and in the sixth, it’s an option. At Friday’s you can probably get chicken in the ketchup, in the Coke, in the paper towel dispenser by the sink. It’s a chicken assembly line. Or maybe “disassembly.”

Someone ordered appetizers, cognizant that several at the table profess some degree of intolerance for the hormone and antibiotic-soaked mass-meat product typical of the modern American diet. Therefore one of the two platters contained no overt flesh. You might think I’d be pleased. In the effort, yes… in the execution, not so much.

I’d already picked out the celery garnish from the first platter (which aside from the token greenery contained five kinds of chicken). A glance at the second platter revealed a traditional Greek treat, something I ate and enjoyed several times on Santorini: fried zucchini. OK, so, not the healthiest food on the planet, but probably the healthiest food at TGI Friday’s.

I speared one, dunked it in the least-offensive of the available sauces, and then watched in horror as the breaded slab split to reveal not a tender slice of squash, but… you guessed it… cheese!

And then, the dilemma. On my plate lay a broken piece of fried cheese, which I didn’t want to eat. But to leave it on the plate would be to waste food. To return it to the appetizer platter, broken, drooping, and sauce-soggy, was unthinkable. I considered waiting for someone to reach for one of the other cheese slab things, and quietly offering mine, but dismissed the idea as unworkable. (“Hey, you want my food? No, I didn’t ‘do anything to it!’”)

One of the worst things about being a picky eater is explaining the logic behind every decision. It can be amusing sometimes, but other times I just don’t want to explain why I think cows are poisonous, any more than I want to hear some Atkins-diet nutball tell me he lost five pounds eating bacon three times a day.

Back and forth I went, not wanting to waste food, not wanting to eat this particular food, not wanting to make a scene, not wanting to invite questions of “hey, I thought you didn’t eat dairy?!” when in fact I generally do not…

In the end, the cheese won out. I choked it down, pretending it was zucchini after all.

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could listen to music while you were sleeping?

I tried it a few times in college. I’d figured, so long as I’m just laying there sleeping anyway, I might as well enjoy some tunes. But it didn’t work very well, for the obvious reason (I had to keep waking up to change the CD).

(On the subject of college-era musical experiments… I remember once cranking 99 Luftballons to about 120 db while I walked across campus to see how far away I’d be able to hear my own stereo through the window. Did it even occur to me that my neighbors on 4 sides might be cursing my name while their teeth shook to the fat synth-bass of 1980s German pop? Yes, of course, but I did it anyway. I mean, come on, it was Nena. None of my neighbors ever said a word about it.)

I dreamt the other night that I took my parents and most of my local friends out to dinner at the French Laundry. I think I’d eaten too much that day, and as my overburdened system tried to cope with the masses of surplus food, a deep memory was triggered — of another night of masses of surplus food. In the dream, waiters kept coming and coming, an endless stream of photo-perfect gourmet bites of saffron-scented, brown-buttered, reduction-sauced artfood. We ate and ate and ate and felt not well at all. But at least I woke up before the bill came, because otherwise this dream would have been a nightmare.

Is this what they mean by wireless networking?

To their credit, Netgear Tech Support promptly offered to ship me a replacement unit. This switch is 22 months old but is apparently still under warranty.

(The problem, if you’re unfamiliar with networking hardware, is not that there are six link lights lit even though no cables are plugged in. The problem is that one of those six phantom connections is reading at only 10 Mb/sec! Appalling, just appalling.)

The sound of thumping from upstairs could mean only one thing — it was finally that time of the morning when I can turn my office stereo up real loud.

I sprinted upstairs to greet the thumper, before settling back into the day’s work and some high-volume speedmetalthrashfolkpianosolos… but stopped short at the top of the stairs. The windows were all purple. That is, the white shades were all glowing purple, as if on the other side was a really great sunrise, or a nuclear fireball that was about to vaporize my windows, their shades, and the guy tottering at the top of the basement stairs wishing he had a camera in his hand.

Anyway, it was a great sunrise after all. The colors were already fading when I finally had my camera ready, but still, it was amazing.

The other day I read in Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone that asparagus is a spring crop, although it “appears again for the holidays.” I thought that was odd, that a particular vegetable would show up for the holidays like a weird cousin with bad hygiene who will pollute the bathroom but nevertheless wants a place to stay for a few days.

Ms. Madison is correct, though — I went to the grocery store, and sure enough there was a big display of asparagus, imported from some distant place like Anaheim. Heh. Actually it was from South America. I guess it’s not so much that the stores import asparagus for Christmas; more likely, the crops in the other hemisphere are just now being harvested.