Tag Archives: Mondays

Non-fiction

A Blog That Has Nothing To Do With a Black-and-White Picture of a Dilapidated House.

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I find it hard to believe that anyone can appreciate a Monday morning, but the weather is cooler today, which comes as a surprise. It’s usually too hot to tolerate at this time of day. I don’t know what it is.

But anyway, I anticipate the week will be long with a lot of work to do, hard work, not easy. Each day is glued to my feet. I can’t stomach the beginning, but the beginning shall end at some point, just not now. What can I do to remedy the situation?

This dog is sniffing my feet in the coffee shop. How did we get to the point where they’ve allowed dogs everywhere? I remember 1982 when you could only bring your dog outside where they can shit in the grass. Now I see baristas petting dogs with the same hands that are pouring coffee for beloved customers. That’s a health violation, not that I’ll turn him in. I’m just saying… I’ve never owned a dog and probably never will–too much maintenance.

The old lady is doing rounds in here, going up to just about every table and shooting the breeze with other customers while her white dog wags its tail and looks at every person who walks by. Watching his tail wag is like following a metronome. It’s mesmerizing.

It smells like cafeteria food here as another customer once commented. I can’t take credit but I’ll agree anyway.

I ate at a Hungarian restaurant last night with my parents and their friends to celebrate one of their birthdays, and had the lobster mac and cheese. It was decent, but I still can’t understand the combination of seafood with pasta, especially this. But I still ate it all because I love food too much.

I observed what everyone else was eating. The man who sat across from me ordered the New England clam chowder for an appetizer and crab cakes for dinner, although they didn’t have crab cakes on the menu, so I was a little bit confused.

I asked him, “How did you order the crab cakes? They’re not even on the menu.”

He smiled at me (as he always smiles) and said, “Yes they are.”

I didn’t want to argue with him but I was right. There were no crab cakes on the menu. He must’ve misread it.

When they brought his clam chowder it looked nothing like it. It was yellow and watery, but he sipped it and insisted it was clam chowder even though it looked more like corn chowder, which I’d never eaten before. He sipped the whole thing before his crab cakes arrived, and I was right. He was wrong. They weren’t crab cakes. They were crab raviolis in a mysterious yellow sauce. Only two of them, and they were normal-size raviolis. I never order those for that exact reason. Restaurants always cheat you with crab cakes or raviolis. I expect at least six pieces. Anything less is a cheat. He ate them in a few bites, and it took me about ten minutes or more to finish my bowl of lobster mac and cheese.

My father, who has always had a strange palette, ordered the lobster chopped salad with balsamic vinaigrette and blue cheese crumbles, which weren’t on the menu either, but they had it anyway. He enjoyed what he ate. But I had to question his decision to order those things with the salad. Furthermore I had to wonder about his decision period to order salad with lobster on it. Then again I’d ordered mac and cheese with lobster, but it looked like the only decent item on the strangest menu I’ve seen in months. I’m not a huge fan of duck or fried chicken with chimichurri salsa–whatever that is. Why couldn’t they have served something normal there? Call me simple, but don’t overcomplicate things on the menu.

I looked at the decor. It was a plain restaurant, like a Panera Bread, except for the art. Someone had painted a portrait of the Mona Lisa with dogs and cats wearing glasses and ballcaps, and another framed picture of the Girl With A Pearl Earring smoking a cigarette on a tree stump, with more dogs and cats wearing glasses and ballcaps. I couldn’t get a handle on the place, but every Hungarian restaurant I’ve been to has been a little strange.

Non-fiction

The First Monday Back

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I’m sitting in the corner of the coffee shop observing everyone. There are one, two, three, four, five other customers sitting at their tables. Every one one of them is absorbed in their smartphones. We have come to this point. I used to predict how the future would look and got some of it right. One of those things was something like Youtube. I believed every person would have his/her/their own channel. For the most part, it ended up being correct. Except I don’t have a channel and I doubt I ever will.

Another prediction was that the cars would be rounder than before. They were too boxy in the eighties and nineties. The manufacturers decided, “Hey, it’s the future. Let’s make everything round.” Lo and behold, I saw them on the streets, these older models, round and futuristic. Some of them came out ugly, others improved.

Anyway, it’s a growing concern to me how everyone is stuck to their phones. I’m guilty as well except for now. The phone will distract me from emptiness later today. I’ll keep checking for new emails without a clue of what I’m looking for.

How will this Monday unfold? There’s a lot of anxiety about going back to work. I don’t know what emails I’ll have to deal with or how much work is in front of me.

My birthday was yesterday. Mom and Dad showed up to my door in the middle of the afternoon after a long drive back in town, anxious to see how my air conditioner was working. It impressed them how cold it was in my apartment.

After a few hours of chatting, we went to a restaurant called Lulu’s for dinner. The heat was one-hundred-and-eleven degrees. It was a slow, painful walk there, as if we were walking in mud, hot mud. Lulu’s was cool inside. The manager sat us in the middle of the dining area. Mom asked if the patio was comfortable enough to sit in. I thought she’d gone insane. We whined at the fact that they served Pepsi, not Coke. I ordered a Pepsi anyway, even if it’s far too inferior.

Our waiter didn’t have much of a personality. My father commented on that when she wasn’t around. She was more of a Flo from Flo’s diner, the type of waiter who would carry a pencil on her ear to take down our orders on a small pad.

Dad ordered the strawberry salad with shrimp. Not only did I wonder what the hell a strawberry salad would be, but who would eat shrimp with strawberries?

I ordered the swiss and mushroom burger, medium rare, while my mother ordered the chicken sandwich. The burger was charbroiled, which I don’t prefer, with romaine as its lettuce when it’s usually iceberg. It took up over thirty percent of the burger. I deleafed most of the lettuce to where there was only one slice. The cheeseburger wasn’t as much as a job as it was before.

My mother became fascinated by the tables because some of them had hooks on the underside of them, not all of them. Ours didn’t. She could’ve hung her purse on the hook. I could’ve hung my hat there since I wasn’t wearing it indoors.

We left Lulu’s and came back to my apartment for carrot cake and red velvet cake to celebrate my birthday. I ate only a few bites because I had eaten too much. They left after eating the cake to drive home and unpack. I still had to go grocery shopping to my chagrin.

Now it’s Monday. I’ll face the music at work. At least Thursday will be July Fourth. Only a four-day work week is ahead of me.