Not without snacks.
I wish I were a scintillating conversationalist. I was standing in front of a canvas in my cellar yesterday thinking, “That’s not what it was supposed to look like.” I have conversations like that too, with the difference that you can paint over an oil painting. All I can do to salvage a conversation is blog about it.
Like this:
My wife and I were in a restaurant yesterday. Two women came in, one carrying a cello in a hard case.
“Look, a cello,” I said.
“I know that,” my wife said.
We had the schnitzel special. My wife and my daughter substituted potatoes with parsley for the potato salad. Judging from my digestion afterwards, a good choice.
We had been at the Museum of Natural History in Vienna. Afterwards, my wife and daughter were hungry. Lunchtime. I couldn’t make up my mind if I was or not. My wife, hungry, sheds her human mask and reveals a ball of Taser-packing copperheads underneath and she passed the gene to Gamma.
I found the cafe in the museum overpriced, and my wife found the service too slow, and so the fun started. We left in search of lunch; my priority: reasonably priced, reasonable quality. Their priority: food, now.
Never forget: always bring snacks.
The restaurant in the butterfly house was full. Doh, lunchtime. The cafe in the Albertina museum theoretically has good food, but it’s up at the top of the museum and we figured we’d get there, discover it was full and have to wander on so we skipped it.
Gamma had her heart set on spaghetti. She was sort of chanting it. Alpha led the way, saying things like, “Come on!” and “What, you’re not wearing gloves? Are you crazy?” and, “if you’d gotten a Ph.D. we’d be eating juicy steaks Right Now.” I was holding Gamma’s hand and trying to distract her. I saw a poster for a documentary about a group of accordionists from various cultures. I’d love to see that movie. Alpha wasn’t interested in backtracking to come see the poster, though, and Gamma and I had to jog a bit to catch up.
Three granola bars, you know? Or animal crackers, or three bananas. The world would have been a different place.
We ended up at the restaurant waiting for our schnitzels. We warned Gamma not to drink up all her Fanta at once because it had to last her through her entree.
Two women came in, one carrying a cello in a hard case.
“Look, a cello,” I said.
in my world, if you’d gotten a PhD, you’d be going through a dumpster looking for bread that wasn’t too moldy. no, really.
Well, no, not really, but close. When I was in a PhD program, the salaries I was hearing people starting at were less than 10% more than the mediocre library staff salary I was making seven years earlier.
She could have suggested you were lacking a degree in “something useful”; like the old joke about St. Peter letting the lawyer into heaven ahead of the priest “because we have so few of them here”.
Didn’t you even have a tic-tac? No emergency chocolate stash? Pffft. Amateur.
Seriously. Carry chocolates. Or a small bag of nuts – those are the best because you can convince yourself there’s protein entering your system. Even cough drops help for the blood sugar thing, and as I recall you guys have some tasty tasty cough drops there.
Copperheads with Tasers. Hee.
At least they don’t get so hungry they can’t spare the energy to determine what exactly it is they want to eat. That happens to me way too often.
Ehm, the PhD thing wasn’t exactly a verbatim quote. It seemed like the sort of thing a copperhead would say. Call it painting with a broad brush. We had granola bars. In the car. Parked far away in a garage.
And tasty cough drops. Which we ate like, eh, candy. Tasty, sugar-free cough drops.
When I get hungry, glucose-starved hungry, I don’t have any idea what I want to eat. Usually I don’t even realize hunger is my problem. Gamma, however, was saying, “I want spaghetti. With meat sauce.” She may have said al dente, too.
“I was standing in front of a canvas in my cellar yesterday thinking…”
When I read that, “cellar” sounded like “chellar” in my head.
is ‘chellar” how they say ‘cello’ in certain New York accents? I should know this. I once went out with a guy whose sister’s name was Anita, and they did call her ‘Aneeder’, but only when the word following her name began with a vowel. Thus, “Anita did a baaaad, baaaad thing”; but “Aneeder is a naughty, naughty girl.”
I was just in New York City with my wife and we saw a musical called “Shock Headed Peter”.
Why do I bring it up? Because all the songs featured the accordian prominently, and also be cause almost all of the songs ended with “and then he (or sometimes she) was………….. Dead.”
A great play, I think out of England necessarily. We also say “Spam-a-lot” but there were no accordians that I recall.
wow, I gotta preview these things first. We DO say “Spam-a-lot”, but in this case we SAW “Spam-a-lot”..