Failure of the Day: Meatballs

Chris is out of town on business again. He left yesterday; he'll be back tonight. Not a huge trip or anything; just enough to make me a little mopey. I'm pretty good at putting a good spin on it for myself…sort of.

I figured I would take myself out to dinner and then to a poetry reading not too far away. I wound up working a little later than I expected and when I finally finished, I was starving. I had planned to go Pluto's and get their giant Caesar salad with flank steak, but Paul said this afternoon that the last time he went there he found a bug in the salad. I'm not sure if that was an actual event or an example of their general decline, but the idea of that was enough to ix-nay Plutos.

And then my brain got all complicated—it was too early to go to dinner and then go directly to the reading, but I was famished. And I didn't even know where I would go. After three years in Seattle where the pickins were slim, here I'm surrounded on all sides by really great restaurants, and I was just sort of immobilized with choices.

And then I thought maybe I wouldn't go to the reading. (That is a thing I do: decide for positive sure that I will do something and then spend all day telling myself I will do and then just poop out and realize I can't be bothered.) Maybe I would just go to Green Apple because all of a sudden I had a bee up my butt for After The Quake by Haruki Murakami, which I've picked up and put back like seven different times. But then I thought if I went to Green Apple, I should go before I eat so I'd have something to read while I was eating. But that was no good on account of the extreme hunger. So I decided to eat first.

I decided I wanted something with meatballs and Ernesto's is closed on Mondays so I thought Gaspare's would do even though it's not so good. But as I was walking there I kept thinking, in a town full of great restaurants when I can go anyplace I want, why would I go to a medium-crappy Italian place? But by that point I was at Gaspare's. I actually had my hand on the door before I made myself turn around.

I thought since I would have to get on the bus to go to Green Apple, I might as well get on the bus now and maybe look at some of Clement Street restaurants. There's a place called Q that I'm mildly curious about. So I get to Clement street and lo and behold, Burma Super Star is open with a big sign that says Now Open Mondays! Burma Super Star is nearly my favorite restaurant on the earth. But then I thought it's not so good for one person because no way could I go there and not have the tea leaf salad, but tea leaf salad and something else was too much and tea leaf salad alone was not enough.

I finally found this mysterious Q restaurant, but it got disqualified by announcing on their menu that they put things like mango salsa on one of their meat entrees and I tend to reject that on principle. In addition to being anti-fruit, I am especially anti hot-fruit-and-meat combinations.

But by then I was practically at Green Apple and I had gotten so hungry that I stopped being hungry which happens sometimes for reasons I really don't understand. But so in I go to definitely, definitely get After The Quake by Haruki Murakami. And they had it in paperback and I found it easily but the cover had a drawing of three goddamn effies. I swear, there's some sort of truly heinous effie media conspiracy. I bought it though, and immediately tore of the offending portion of the cover.

I finally took the bus back out to my neighborhood and got rice and wontons at Yet Wah, which is one of my all time favorite dinners.

And it may be long and of no interest to anyone at all, but this is the completely true story of what happens to indecisive, yackity-brain girls in the big city.