Wednesday, June 04, 2003

Last night no cooking, only coughing, packing with Eric, and the ultimate expression of gustatory self-pity – fried dumplings from a bad Chinese takeout.  Leftover pork would have been a better option of course, and it wouldn’t have taken that much effort to whip up some Sauce Moutarde to go over it, but that would have been to not take our eating experience to the bottomless depths of bathos.  Not the way that ordering Chinese place down the road does.  Each of the maybe four times we’ve ordered from this place in the, what, nine months we’ve been here, the lady on the phone, when I give her our address, says in this very Miss Saigon voice, “You not call in long long time.”  We think that the previous tenant must have eaten bad Chinese food pretty much every night of his life.  Which somehow adds to the pathetic-ness of it all As does the fact that I am still in the middle of the Cold From Hell.  The mephistophelean nature of this illness lies not in its blatantly cruel method of keeping both myself and my husband from rest with violent bouts of coughing that come at roughly seven minute intervals, all night long.  Nor in its way of making me feel that I have had the entire underside of my skin lined with a lead ball bearings, so that I can barely keep my head off my desk at work, or my eyelids open.  No, the truly evil thing about this cold is that it comes during this particular first week in June, Hellweek around the old East Wing (though admittedly there are multiple Hellweeks in the East Wing Calendar) and in Julie’s Life, as well.  I’ve prepared the way for one 8 am breakfast meetings, and will help oil the gears for the behemoth of an All Advisory Council Meeting tomorrow evening.  In between, this evening the Film Crew is coming again to my house – actually, they’re going to follow me home from work.  Grocery shopping.  On the subway.  Not that I’m not grateful and all that.  It’s just, you see, that I’m dying.  From the Cold from Hell. So last night, eating fried dumplings and Szechuan beef that I can’t taste or easily swallow because of my cold, which is probably a good thing, I got to thinking about food and depression.  Here’s my thought, born of some circuitous sad-sack thought patterns: I think that in order to really care about food, you have to have experienced depression, or at least great difficulties.  This is not to say that everyone who’s depressed is a gourmet, of course.  But most of the people I know who really, sincerely happy most of the time are also profoundly uninterested in food.  Food for them is just fuel to get them through the next day at the beach.  Whereas people who’ve experienced great pain, either self-inflicted or not, sometimes come to the preparation and eating of great food as both a comfort and an affirmation of life, sometimes much needed and hard to find. Or then again, maybe everybody’s fucking miserable, and some of them also like to eat.   7:27:05 AM    comment []