Something I Wrote for Class

Once upon a now, a man walks through a door with a little glass display case next to it. In this display case is a sheet of paper with a bunch of words like, "Filet" and "Escarole" and "Sautéed," and numbers next to them. Just inside the door, next to a piece of mahogany furniture that resembles a lectern, stands a high school senior in her old prom dress. She asks the man, "Just one?" and he replies, "No, I'm waiting for someone."

He takes a seat in one of the several chairs by the door and waits. After some number of minutes, a woman in a white blouse walks into the frame of one of the full-wall windows in the front of the building. The man stands and opens the door; the woman walks through and kisses him on the cheek. The pair approaches the lectern and the man says, "Michaels, seven-thirty," whereupon the girl in the prom dress extracts two large leathery rectangles from the lectern and says, "If you'll please follow me," and leads them through a matrix of tables and chairs, some occupied and others empty.

The pair sits at a table in the back of the room, and the girl hands them the leather tablets and hurries away back to her post at the front. They sit near an alcove with two doors. Each has a simplistic little image of a man or a woman on it, and as they open the leather booklets, (revealing the same sheet of paper displayed outside the building,) a man goes through the appropriately labeled door, returning shortly after looking nonchalant. The man and woman scan the paper, sometimes making comments like, "The chicken sounds good," and "I wonder if I can get the gnocchi without mushrooms."

Just then, a recent college graduate approaches the table with two glasses of water and a pad of paper. He asks the couple, "Do you have any questions about the menu tonight?" and the man replies, "No, we're quite alright. I think we'll order now," and he turns to the woman across from him and adds, "if that's alright?"

The woman nods and tells the younger man that she'll have some items on the menu, then the man says he'll have some other items on the menu, then adds that they'd like a bottle of a kind of obscure French terminology. The man repeats everything they said and walks away, and the couple falls into the typical small talk about each other's respective days and how great it is that this restaurant has stayed in business with the economy being so poor and such.

The meal progresses.

(This following part should be considered separate from the previous one, but it's still from the same assignment.)

The Restaurant is a strange social phenomenon. People voluntarily give up the comfort and convenience of their own homes to travel some distance (which on some occasions can be very far) in order to pay to have a meal prepared by a group of dirty, drugged-up immigrants and consumed in the company of several loud, smelly strangers. Oftentimes, the food is something that the paying party could have prepared at home without too much trouble, and it always costs more than it would if you made it yourself. Somehow, people find it pleasurable to do this--to dine next to someone eavesdropping on your private conversations, or to unintentionally and regrettably hear about the recent developments of the gentleman-sitting-next-to-you's skin disease; to ask for your Cobb salad with dressing on the side, and end up with more than just dressing on the side; to find a cockroach on the table, and wonder how many more there are in your dinner. They are ready and willing to pay exorbitant amounts of money to have lazy college students drop their dinners on the floor, to wait for the cooks to finish snorting lines off in the walk-in-refrigerator, to drink out of cups that have the previous patron's lipstick glistening on the rim.

From this point on, what I'm writing is for my own reasons that I'm not really sure about. I don't actually feel this way about restaurants. I like going out to eat. Restaurants are pretty awesome. You get (typically) good food for some amount of money that may or may not correlate with the quality of the food, but you don't have to think that hard about what you're going to eat. That's what I don't like about cooking. If I were able to think of what I want to eat just by looking at the stuff in my fridge and thinking, "Hey, I could make a killer omelette with the stuff in my fridge," I would make a killer omelette with the stuff in my fridge. However, I don't think that, and instead I think, "Wow, there's nothing in my fridge to eat. Should I eat some eggs? Nah, eggs are gross plain. I guess I'll make a PB&J..."

Which brings me to my next point. The PB&J is not really a PB&J at all, since PB&J stands for peanut butter and jelly. What most people use to make their PB&Js is jam, not jelly. Therefore, a PB&J is actually a PB&J. Score, Me 1 - Abbreviations 0. Or would it be the other way around? I like it the way where I'm ahead.

Also, why is refrigerator spelled fridge when you shorten it to fridge? It should be frige. I guess it's because it would be pronounced "frige." That's totally unacceptable, especially when you don't know at all what I meant that pronunciation to sound like. Neither do I, for that matter.

I'm taking a linguistics class, so theoretically I could write out the phonetic pronunciation with all the weird symbols, but I don't know how to make them on the keyboard, so I'm just going to be vague.

By the way, I normally don't write like the first part of this blog. That was a kind of weird experiment in an attempt to please my teacher. I'm not sure what he'll think of it, but I get the feeling that you could give him anything and he could see it any way he wanted to see it, whether it was brilliant or totally idiotic. I hope mine isn't actually idiotic, and he thinks that it's brilliant even if it isn't.

Other than that, I think I should probably go work on this class some more, since what I've done for it is really insubstantial. Whatever. I like it.