Yum

I had lunch with Yuan Yuan, her mom and her step-dad today. Just one lunch, not three. We went to pick up our butcher knife from her mom's place, she has a smithy or a special rock or something that sharpens knives. We got the knife. It's sharp. There will be no more playing the grapefruit game with the knife.

The lunch was an unexpected bonus. I wasn't really in the mood to see anyone other than Yuan Yuan and myself in the mirror, so when we went for a walk and Yuan Yuan suggested we pick up the knife, I said that that was fine as long as we didn't have to stay there and be social. Yuan Yuan swore a terrible oath that we would sneak in, grab the knife and run back faster than it is polite to run from family. But when we arrived, complications arose. Yuan Yuan's step-dad was in the vicinity, we didn't know in which direction to run and then Yuan Yuan's mom rushed out with a bag full of food, stuffed us both in her armpit and carried us to the nearest restaurant, where we ordered two dishes and a soup for appearance's sake and then unraveled the smorgasbord she'd prepared in the 3 seconds it took for Yuan Yuan to get her hands on the knife.

Lunch was fine, but it reminded me, very quickly and with tremendous special effects, why I don't like eating out. When I'm at home, in relative safety, there's no danger that I'll be kicked out or an impatient waiter will swoop in and clear the dishes before I can dislodge the half of a potato from my throat and shriek in protest. But whenever I go to a restaurant, my body, which is after all just a product of the long and painful evolution of a lonely starving monkey trapped on a glacier to this beautiful specimen of man meat, decides that it needs to stock up on food and turns into a Roomba, devouring everything on the table that's smaller than it and that doesn't skitter out of the way. This binge continues until the oxygen flow to the brain is all but cut off and the brain starts panicking and issuing gag reflexes and knee jerks. But by then 6-7 pounds of fuel has made itself a warm little nest in my belly. Blech. And I mean that literally.