guest post 8

More from Kep:

I had lunch with Nina last month, just before she left for Europe. I should have taken a picture of it, because I find her lunch habits so irritating that it’s time to shame and humiliate her in public. Nina – you knew this was coming!

You ask her out to lunch and right away she says: fine, but it has to be at a place that has good coffee.

So I am rackin’ my brains: what’s close to campus, has good food and good coffee? I give up. You pick, I tell her. So we wind up not at all close to campus, at a place that has no food to speak of (“oh, I guess they ran out,” says ms. charmer herself), and I have to watch her slurp milky caffeine, all hour long. I mean, how long can you work a cup of coffee, for God’s sake.

I noted that she carries with her chewing gum which is good. Friends, if you drink milky coffee, do remember that the combo gives a person terrible halitosis. Try riding in the front seat with someone who insists on swinging by Starbucks drive-up and then orders some latte or cappuccino and neglects to pop a spearmint baby into the mouth. Crank open the windows!

But about the lunch. I asked Nina if she thinks it’s healthy living to crunch a bar, drink coffee and then devour a pear back in the car (did anyone besides me ever get her lecture about healthy living? I know what I am doing wrong, damn it. It’s the doing it wrong that’s the problem, not my lack of knowledge about it!) and she ticks it off on her little Polish fingers: protein, produce, grains.

All the women I have ever lived with did lunch basically around rabbit food. There were piles of greens, mixed with more greens, with an occasional orange carrot or red radish thrown in (talk about fetid breath! Do not smooch after a radish; just write the day off for intimacy; your partner will understand and be grateful, believe me). And when I was in college, all the women would band together around lunchtime and do yogurt. Yogurt. Pop the lid, dig in the spoon and you’re done in 25 seconds. I defy anyone to take longer than that over a yogurt.

So fine. Protein, produce, grains. My asiago roast beef sandwich (roast beef, smoked cheddar, lettuce, tomatoes, red onions and creamy horseradish sauce, on an asiago cheese demi) happens to have the same. We swung by Panera on the way back and Nina did one of those fake hit her hand on her head routines, with an “oh yeah, I forgot they had good coffee here!” as I rushed through my prize meal in the five minutes we had left for our break.