The Reluctant Receptionist

the food situation around the office i work in is dismal. thousands and thousands of people work in the few blocks that i’m working, yet there isn’t a single affordable, edible thing to purchase. sure, i’ve seen people walking around with bags of chipotle (pronounced chih-poe-tul by my mother, who got extremely defensive when i corrected her and demanded that i tell her how i knew that my pronunciation was correct. i couldn’t tell her why i knew—i just knew—and so, like most arguments with my mother, she won) and as much as i love it, it’s expensive. and i’m already spending 8 hours a day sitting on my ass in this cubicle (pronounced cue-bye-klee) so the last thing i need is a 1500 calorie burrito, even if it’s filled with delicious homemade guacamole and greasy, wonderful beef and beans and cheese and spicy salsa i’ll be right back.

anyway, since the food situation around here is bleak, i bring my own lunch. that’s made just a little bleaker by the fact that there’s no microwave that i can find in this office. i assumed there’d be one in the “kitchen” my first day here, so i brought leftover pesto that phong had made, only to find that my option was to pretend that it was some kind of pasta salad. i have to play tricks on my mind like that. so i’ve taken to bringing the same lunch every day, a lunch that is shelf-stable, cheap as dirt (because, as much as i learned this summer and as wonderful as it was, i am now nearly broke. and the paychecks i’ve gotten, hereafter to be referred to as “paychecks,” weren’t even enough to cover my storage space rental, much less actual bills or rent or insurance.), and doesn’t have to be microwaved. i bring a ham sandwich with dijon mustard, a plastic baggie of chips (or, today, cheetos), and a quaker chewy granola bar.

as i was eating my lunch at my desk today, so that i can use my lunch hour to go to the gym, i realized something (specifically, while i was stuffing my face full of cheetos): the meal that i’d brought myself was the exact same meal that my mother packed me when i was in pre-school. i don’t mean, like, sort of the same. i mean,

ham sandwich
cheetos
quaker chewy granola bar.

the exact same. she’d pack it in a metal disney world themed lunchbox, which started to take on the smell of its contents after a while. i have a very vivid memory (tied to the memory of making art by blowing paint around a piece of paper and nearly passing out from blowing so much) of eating this exact lunch, but in preschool. if you switch wonder bread out for the whole wheat i brought today, it’d have been identical except for its packaging.

the more things change, the more they stay the same.