Real-life was no fun last week. I had a flu of bubonic proportions, and was surrounded by office politics and grown up street fights. All I wanted was Friday, the start of a 3-day weekend so I could just let loose, wear flip flops, breathe. And finish season 3 of 24.
On the eve of my sister's SAT, we decided to get a nice dinner so she could relax before the big day. The most obvious choice was Matt's, the overpriced, overrated, overcrowded diner in Waldwick. Wanting to forget our present lives in its entirety, we pretended it was one of those arbitrary summer days when the wind messed up our hair and the music on the radio could shatter the suburban silence without reprimand.
Unfortunately, it was a bit chilly. The flu left me weak, and I was not ready to run my fingers through the night air, and instead kept the windows rolled up. My sister protested, and suggested (with exasperation) I put on my jacket. I refused, and insisted the windows stay up. Besides my runny nose, the cold was also bad for my knee. Resigned to life with a geriatric sister, Manu could do nothing but fumble with the radio; finding nothing, we resolved to play her iPod. Since we didn't have the deck with us, we decided to improvise--we set the volume to the max, and I held up the headphones so that we could hear the faint rumblings of something remotely R&B. And so we drove to the diner, with but remnants of our carefree summer nights, headphones and shivers in hand.
Once we sat at the diner, thoroughly looked over the menu as if it had changed at all in the last 7 or 8 years. I told my sister I was really craving their veggie burger. "But I thought you hated it," she said as she briefly flirted with the idea of getting scrambled eggs. "Yes, but I am really craving it. I just want their awful veggie burger. It falls apart every time, but I want that mush." She shrugged her shoulders and went with the penne a la vodka.
Her meal came with salad, which was so unfresh we only ate the kidney beans and stale croutons. My burger was reliably awful, and as I picked it up it fell through my fingers, so that I was forking broken veggie patty doused in ketchup, with lettuce leaves and coleslaw. Once my nostalgia was satiated, I became angry at myself for intentionally paying for bad food. I then resolved to finish my sister's dish, which was just short of authentic Italian, leaning towards something like Kraft or Velveteen.
On our way home, we stopped at Van Dyks, to wash down our gourmet meal. I was too full from finishing 2 dishes, and still too cold from the October skies, but my sister got cookies 'n' cream. On the way home, I held the headphones in one hand and the ice cream in the other, and periodically fed her large spoonfuls so that she could drive with both hands on the wheel. We're all about the safety.
By the time I went to bed (after watching a couple of hours of Jack Bauer saving Los Angeles from a biological weapon), I had forgotten everything I had ever worried about, and fell asleep to the sounds of an undercooked veggie patty swimming uncomfortably in my stomach.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment