Today I had the pleasure of meeting with a group of friends at a Chinese buffet at about 3 PM. Naturally, it was pretty empty with the exception of an elderly couple, the owners’ kids (concentrating hard on homework), and this bald guy who looked pretty cool. At one point, I got up to get myself some egg drop soup. While I was filling my bowl with the viscous stuff, which seemed to me more mucus-like than soup-like, the elderly woman engaged herself in pointing at some breaded, crispy, meaty looking things and croaking, “What is that? What is that? What is that?” Frankly, I did not know, and I was far enough away that her question obviously wasn’t directed at me. In due time, a man with cooking clothes (apron, chef’s hat, etc.) came over and pointed to the label above the dish. “Pizza,” he said, as he pointed to the crooked label that clearly read, “Pizza;” the food looked more like fried chicken than pizza, so I will unhesitatingly state that I fully believe that this restaurant worker had never seen a slice of pizza in his life.
Unsatisfied with the cook’s answer, the woman reverted to her consistent asking: “What is that? What is that? What is that?”
In less-anecdotal news:
Kristen and I recently broke up, and so I feel obligated to remove the link to the Valentine’s Day shrine to her. I’m a little reluctant, seeing as how it comprises about half of the content on my site, but I also don’t want her to beat me up. I’ve kept the page at http://www.ianmh.com/vday/ but removed it from the tab list on the main page.
I was also about a virtual inch away from having another page of content on my site, but, for legal reasons, I cannot put it up right away. (Don’t get too excited–it has nothing to do with drugs, sex, bombs, or John Elway. In fact, it has more to do with orthography than anything, which is considered by most of the world to be the most uninteresting subject ever devised.)