There before me, splayed tastefully in all its leafy green glory, was a salad. I really can’t remember the last time I had one for lunch–or, honestly, any of the other meal times deemed acceptable by society–but I had to make good on my promise. Presumably a salad should irradiate health, and I think I spied some filtering through the bacon-cheese-egg-chicken veneer of my Cobb.
Jury’s still out on whether this lifestyle change is sustainable, though. The biggest barrier to entry is a bowl of greens simply isn’t my favorite shape of food. Don’t you ever wonder what secrets (i.e. bugs) are nestled away in those crevices of romaine? I do. Broccoli florets especially freak me the fuck out, with their veritable forests of deceit. Having said that, I will full well admit the shapes of food I do enjoy–waffle fries, cheesesteaks, nachos–will kill me in quantity.
There is also the issue of feeling emasculated when ingesting a salad. It’s ridiculous, I know. Part of it stems–hey-o–from the act of carefully stabbing at vegetation with a fork. These are the motions of a kinder, more civilized era. Conversely, there’s a primal thrill to gripping a burger singlehandedly and tearing into it. It is a ritual coursing with power. It’s like you’re screaming, “I am man! Such is my dominion over beef.” Also, coronary.
It’s a curious crosshatch: you crave cow, but you have to eat your greens like a cow, in order to prevent yourself from being a fat cow. All told, my Cobb salad was certainly filling, and I didn’t even finish it. Can a workweek consist of two salad days, possibly three? I don’t know. I still need to determine the optimal frequency–and test the limits of how much the human palate can endure in a given week.
Right around game six of the first set today, just after a particularly sweet serve, I thought I was going to die. My heart began pounding rapidly, to the point where it felt like it was close to bursting out of my chest, and like a fool, I played straight through the pain in a misappropriated show of endurance. I remember racing through a handful of thoughts, chief among them disappointment over how I wouldn’t be able to write tonight.
I’m kidding! Absolutely kidding. Blogging wasn’t one of the things that crossed my mind, nor was anything related to the Internet, frankly, and for that I’m thankful. In retrospect, I think I had all my priorities in order, not that I was exactly looking for a dry run deathbed experience this week. Then again, you wouldn’t really ever look for something like that, I suppose.
But I didn’t want to completely dismiss the topic of writing because I’ve been doing a lot of it recently, both in and out of the office, and it’s been a smooth run. We’ve discussed a few of my rituals before, but I wanted to add a third to the mix. It’s by no means new. It’s simply the mandate to produce something that can elicit emotion, and it’s actually drawn from a quote in an article, almost a decade old, about a seamstress who was trying to improve her English. She spoke about “those big round words that explain better what goes on in your mind…those proper words that come from the deeps of a person, and that burn a little when they’re spoken.” Words that burn, indeed.
For the longest time, particularly during the early years of this website, I thought about implementing a commenting system to enrich our readership. Indeed, I pictured a golden age of online text, gilded by a spectacular, smartly moderated marketplace of talk that would facilitate the free exchange of ideas. But I never got around to it, and then came the advent of real social media, which created in me a deep despair, and Secondhand Rants now, as ever, will remain a one-way conduit of communication.
Social media is on my mind tonight because I was struck by how positively indifferent I felt when I logged onto LinkedIn today. It’s been more than a year since I crossed the proverbial finish line, and since then the sole reason for jamming my username into the sign-in box has been to field invitations. In an odd twist on social constructs, it’s considered rude to ignore solicitations from random people. Weren’t we taught as children to stay the fuck away from strangers who solicited us?
That’s the nature of LinkedIn, I suppose, and so goes the contours of business. You accept these invitations, then brace for the inevitable follow-up e-mail. On days when I’m not in the mood for pitches (e.g. “Do you have time for a quick 15-minute phone call?” or my favorite: “I’m going to be in town tomorrow.”) or insipid talk about weather, I politely shut down the request in favor of “reconnecting” at completely arbitrary intervals of time–four months from today, two quarters down the road, late next year. But going back to the topic of social media, can you really “know” 500+ people? Would you even want to do so? I’m regressing even further, I guess, in modern modes of engagement. A few weeks ago, I was offered a smartphone for work, and my initial reaction was to recoil in horror on the inside, followed by recoiling in horror on the outside.