You know what�s worse than having to eat your lunch while sitting at the side of the road in your car? Having to scoop your lunch out of said car, with your bare hands. Especially if that lunch is a salad, and especially if that salad involved lots of avocado, and a liberal helping of balsamic vinaigrette. To add insult to injury, I had my top down, too, so everybody passing by got to watch as I a) tossed the salad with my kneecaps, causing it to avalanche all over my lap, b) scooped it out from under my seat and out of the crevice between my seat and the gear shift, with my bare hands, c) flung produce onto the boulevard, and c) lacking any sort of napkin, wiped my hands on my shorts, which were already festooned with drying salad giblets.
You might be curious as to why I was eating a very messy salad in my car while stopped at the side of the road (then again you might not, but�oh well). I was on my way to visit my friend Argyle, who had invited me to an undisclosed location ("It�s out in, like, Glen-something, Something Hills�or something. Anyway, you take a left on�um, wait, no, you take a right on�no, let me call you back."), and when it became apparent that neither of us had any idea where I was headed, I decided to pull over and eat rather than tempt fate (it was at this point that Irony hitched a ride).
Argyle, it seems, has no real working knowledge of the Los Angeles area. A Swede I once sat next to on the shuttle from LAX commented that in his homeland, a two-hour drive is practically border to border, while in LA, "You drive for two hours and are still in the same city!" I snorted back, "Please. You can drive for two hours and still be in the same neighborhood." This is an unfortunate truth about the city in which I live, and it locks us all in an inescapable grid of midday traffic, about which Argyle is optimistically unaware. She figured it would take me around, oh, say, half an hour to make it from where I was to where she wished me to go. It took me half an hour to find a place to pull over and wait for her to call back with directions.
Starving, and not exactly wishing to take the chance that I would reach this destination before fainting dead away, and not sure if there would be food in the offing at�wherever I was headed, I constructed a salad at the grocery store, and counted myself rather resourceful for mustering the wherewithal to enjoy a meal without turning it into an hour-long detour out of an already too long day trip. My smug sense of achievement went missing in action with my very first bite, when the pressure of my fork caused my lunch to do a half gainer into my lap. I stared in disbelief at the mess I�d made before cursing loudly and with abandon (the best kind of cursing), hauling handfuls of wet, leafy greens out of a filthy hollow behind my right foot and damning the company that made the obviously faulty and incorrectly calibrated container.
When I finished eating (and scooping), and received my new directions, it was still another three hours be I finally arrived at Undisclosed Location for an afternoon of swimming (and thusly rinsing my skin free of its balsamic brine), and�a barbecue. As it turned out, my mystery afternoon culminated in another mountain of food, meaning I�d sort of suffered the eruption of Mount Saint Lettuce in vain, when I could just as easily have been munching on a power bar or something. Not that I care much for power bars, but at least I wouldn�t have to worry about them rotting under my seat where I can�t reach them.
Anyway, the moral of the story is clearly to keep the top up, so that when I spill my lunch all over the place while on sun-dappled and chichi side street in Beverly Hills, the snooty passersby can�t see my filthy clothes and make rude judgment calls about me. I feel so much better, knowing what I know now.
Someone Got Here By Searching For: "named her daughter Apple" I�m Watching: Hero, starring Jet Li. It�s like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but without the tiger or the dragon. I�m Talking To: My mother, who called to tell me that�she�s going to call me. My mother is so weird.