Let’s not kid ourselves–chocolate cake that takes three minutes to bake in the microwave is only meant to be consumed out of desperation in the midst of a munchies crisis in the hours between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m. Or by obese people at any time. And yet my dear friend Emily, who was experiencing neither of these, asked to make it in celebration of her birth.

She sent me a link to the recipe for Chocolate Cake in Five Minutes! Monday at work, and we went out before lunch and tried to procure all of the necessary supplies at one of the delis downtown, which is no small feat if you know New York City and its tiny stores. We knew we weren’t going to find the cake flour, so we went looking for cornstarch to add to regular flour like someone suggested in the comments, but they didn’t have that except in huge bags in the back, so one of the guys had to bring us a little takeout soup container full of it. They didn’t have the cocoa, either, so we bought some packets of pre-melted Nestle’s (what?). And then we gathered everything else and went back to the office to experiment.

Surprisingly, what came out was actually very much cake. The moistest chocolate cake you’ve ever seen, at that. It wasn’t quite as sweet or as chocolatety as we would’ve liked it, but we more than made up for that by slathering it in Nutella, chocolate icing, and peanut butter. Even better than the taste, though, was watching it rise in the microwave. For the first minute, it seemed to do nothing. But at the start of the second minute, it lifted straight out of the mug like a tower and then kept on rising almost completely to the top of the microwave before it got too tall to hold itself upright and leaned off the side of the cup at an angle. As soon as we opened the microwave door, though, it sunk right back down to the top of the mug.

Pleased with our work, we then decided to microwave not just a mug but an entire mixing bowl of the stuff. And here’s the result, melted knife and all:

My best friend Tracey pointed this out to me on her visit a few weeks ago, and boy, am I glad she did.

Everyone knows that nothing makes food taste better than a smattering of JOYOUS MELTED CHILD.

Most people see the annual Coney Island Mermaid Parade as an opportunity for frivolity in the sand, a chance to bare it all in the sun, the one time they can feel free to be themselves. I, on the other hand, see it as a chance to eat a hell of a lot of hot dogs and judge other girls’ spare tires.

And so I present to you . . .

I took these pictures in the span of about five minutes, because that’s how long we cared to watch the parade before deciding that we NEEDED Nathan’s hot dogs. The stand on the boardwalk had less of a line and more of a glob of people standing around it, the idea being that it was more efficient to push and shove your way to front any chance you got than to actually wait your turn like decent, rational human beings. Luckily, halfway through our 45-minute wait, I heard my name being said behind me with a question mark, and I turned around to see Leah, who was in a couple of my creative writing workshops at THE Ohio State University and could always be counted on for stories about maybe liking girls when the rest of the class was writing crap about trying yoga for the first time. We chatted about her MFA in creative writing and the fact that she’s actually using it to work for a food and travel magazine (swoon!) and how badly I want to go to Columbia for my Masters and my great boyfriend and her great girlfriend and so on and so on.

When my friends Sonya and Adam got to the order counter finally, I let these elderly ladies who had been sort of edging their way in front of me squeeze in behind them. Sonya turned back around to stand with me, and one of the ladies said to her, “You go ahead.” I said, “Oh, she’s with him,” and the other lady said, “Trust me, we know. We’ve been listening to you for the last half-hour. They’re together, your boyfriend’s on vacation in California, that girl has her Masters degree from Chicago, and you want your Masters degree from Columbia. Well, we live right by Columbia, and we could’ve had a kosher meal up there. For half the price.” Sonya and I laughed, but we secretly thought they were totally creepy.

An hour after first feeling the pangs of hunger, we found a grassy knoll on which to lunch and went about our munching

and slurping

and gnawing like the rabid beasts we are.

My chili cheese fries came with a tiny fork, which was a real shame, because I was ready to plunge my entire head into those things until I saw that they evidently expected me to be civil about it. And the corndog? THE BEST ONE OF MY LIFE.

So, yeah, it was a great time. It’s just kind of funny that we went to Coney Island on the crowdest day of the year just to eat some hot dogs that are there year-round.

On a walk around the city this weekend, my friends and I came across a store in the East Village with a friendly wide-open door, cute drawings of familiar characters hung on every inch of the front window, and inviting chairs corralled on the sidewalk outside. But upon closer inspection, the drawings turned out to be offensive, and the chairs had phrases like Jews Only graffitied on them. I wish I’d thought to look at the name of the place, but at least I have this memento:

New favourite picture of me ever?

A couple of Sundays ago, my ladyfriends and I wanted to meet for brunch–and it should be noted here that brunch in NYC can strangely fall anywhere between the hours of 10 a.m. and 8 p.m.–in my neighborhood of Williamsburg, which is uncharted territory for us as far as brunches go. We planned to check out Egg, which New York Magazine named Best Overall Breakfast this year, but their sign-in sheet was packed, and they stopped serving at 2, so we deliberated for a while

and then walked down to the Roebling Tea Room, which you will be incredibly interested to learn is named after the man who designed the Brooklyn Bridge. (And also the street that the restaurant sits on, but that’s better left unmentioned.)

My friend Emily had her brother’s Yorkiepoo (I know, right?) with her because she’d thought we’d be eating outside, and dogs on patios here are as numerous as taxicabs, but luckily Penny happens to be the cutest dog alive and won our waitress over with only a swish of her little hypoallergenic tail. It also helps that pretty much everyone who sees her mistakes her for a child’s plush toy at first, so Emily could just stuff Penny in her bag and let everyone believe she’s the kind of grown woman who’s unable to leave home without her playthings.

We were seated right away–despite the fact that we were a group of six and the place looked packed–in front of the nearly floor-to-ceiling windows that line the front wall and make it evident that the building was once a warehouse of some sort. They filled the room with light and ruined all of my pictures, but it was well worth it.

The walls were covered in green paper with white molding, antiquey sconces, and equestrians on white horses, the tables were thick, dark wood, and the waitresses were neighborhood women with infrequently-washed hair; funny how those things all fit together.

Bridgette ordered the baked cheddar eggs, which came in a little souffle crock next to a bigger crock of grits, surrounded by two huge slabs of raisin toast with apple butter. I’m used to scrambled eggs that I make myself from $1.99 grocery store cartons, so hers tasted dreamy to me, and her grits had a cheesy taste to them that we didn’t expect.

Emily and Beth ordered egg and cheese sandwiches that looked so boring to me on the menu but turned out to be monsters with dense, seeded bread and a folded heap of fillings. They’re a couple of dieting assholes and left the top of the bun untouched, and I was soooo jealous . . . until my pancake appeared.

The menu touted it as “A BIG BAKED PANCAKE (DUTCHSTYLE W RHUBARB & SPICED BUTTER)”, and never have capital letters been so appropriate. It filled the entire plate and more, piled high with warm fruit and a mound of flecked butter that had just begun to pool. The middle was a bit underdone for my taste, but the outside edge was delightfully crunchy, and the whole thing was filled with fruit. At the time, all of my friends and I were like, “Mmmmm, rhubarb!” But, umm, the menu was wrong, and we realized later that it was actually pears.

LaChantee and her boyfriend, Brandon, ordered a couple of salads that had exciting toppings but were still salads and therefore don’t deserve mention. But they did have homemade potato chips, and that’s the only reason I’m still friends with them.

Our food took approximately an hour to arrive, and no one seemed concerned about patting us on the head and thanking us for waiting, but that and the noise level in the place were the only drawbacks. My iced green tea latte tasted like the most delicious grass imaginable (and I mean that in a good way), and LaChantee loved The Lovers Tea, which arrived in a nicely sized pot with strawberries, vanilla, and sweet cream. The prices were very reasonable (and maybe even cheap) for the amount of food we got, and wine and tea list was extensive. After tasting what I did, I want to go back every week until I’ve tried the whole menu.

To wile away the afternoon, we headed to McCarren Park Pool (featured on this past season of “America’s Next Top Model”) for the Renegade Craft Fair and passed two people doing what appeared to be performance art. This pretty much sums up my neighborhood:

The craft fair took place in the pool, which has been drained for more than a decade now, and was rows and rows of vendors selling their homemade wares. Emily picked up enough Christmas presents to give the entire state of New York a happy holiday, but I kept my purchases to one necklace with a glass strawberry (mostly because I’m too cheap to spend $65 on a felted purse). HOWEVER, the fair was totally inspiring and made me want to go home and start making things right away. Those vintage-fabric skirts selling for $200? I could make one for $2. Those greeting cards with the funny phrases? My best friend and I have been thinking up even funnier ones for months now. And those $65 felted purses? I’m commissioning her to make one for me as we speak.

There was also this amazing project called 1 Bite 7 Days, which is going to be a documentary based on the Japanese proverb that says you gain seven days of life for every new food you try. I didn’t get to participate, because I was too interested in chowing down on Mister Softee ice cream,

but I love the idea of it, especially because Boyfriend Kamran has crammed so many exciting new foods down my throat in the year and nearly nine months I’ve been dating him. I think I should get seven extra years, by the way, for agreeing to eat the GONADS OF A SEA URCHIN with him.

Boyfriend Kamran and I eat a lot of our meals at the Comfort Diner (be forewarned that the website looks to be circa 1997 and was possibly designed by your semi-retarded little sister) near his apartment, because they have down home foods like sweet potato fries and buffalo chicken sandwiches and homemade coconut cakes (not that we ever order cake when there’s a Tasti D-Lite a block away, ’cause we’re not embarrassed to love it).

Anyway, on their green tiled tabletops, they have this weird little mosaic shape that doesn’t really look like anything. Light brown, outlined in gold, and vaguely abstract. In the course of the year and a half we’ve been eating there, we’ve taken to calling it a skewered shrimp. Or “shrump”, which we think is the most hilarious pronunciation ever.

What do you think?

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After a long afternoon of doing everything we could to not so much as look outside, Boyfriend Kamran and I decided that it’d be a real waste of his astronomical Manhattan rent if we didn’t take the short jaunt down to Madison Square Park and enjoy the 6th annual Big Apple Barbecue Block Party, even if it meant melting on the sidewalk two feet outside the door.

Unfortunately, we decided this at 5:30 p.m., and the thing ended at 6, so by the time we reached Madison Ave., the crowds were leaving with heaping takeout containers of pork. We passed some tents on Madison but went on into the park in hopes that the best BBQ would have prime locations there, but we were soon lost amidst beer and dessert tents and lots of laughing, pig-filled sweaty people. When we finally wove our way out, police officers were waving everyone away from the BBQ tents, saying that everything was closed, but some helpful workers directed us around the corner to a lone stand that was still serving. We tipped over strollers and old ladies to join the expanding line, but alas, there was no food left.

Not willing to admit defeat, though, we found a puddle of yelloworange BBQ sauce spread on the street and figured that if we could just get our hands on some half-chewed pork butt, we could work something out:

No? Okay, fine. Instead, we took it as an opportunity to have dinner at Shake Shack, which is a burger institution around these parts. I’d only ever ordered the black and white shake–vanilla ice cream with a hint of hot fudge–in my few visits to the Shack, so I was excited to get my hands on those renowned burgers for the first time.

And they were good, no doubt, in the way that your mom’s burger is good; very freshly-made and very grilled-in-the-backyard with no added spices or marinades. Kamran had the Shackburger, which was lightly smoothed with a layer of sauce that tasted like a very spicy mayonnaise, and I had a plain ol’ cheeseburger with yellow mustard. It was yummy beef to be sure, but it was no ginormous, perfectly-seasoned slab like the one at Cozy Soup ‘n’ Burger, which I’m going to argue is the best burger in New York City until I die.

Our desserts were similarly good. Kamran had a caramel shake that clearly used quality ice cream, and I had the Shack Attack, which was a squat container filled with thick chocolate custard, chocolate-covered cookie dough, chocolate chunks, and chocolate sprinkles. (It supposedly had hot fudge in it, too, but it was either swirled in or nonexistent.) I had a bit of a chocolate overload by the time I was finished and kind of wished that the custard had been vanilla and that the hot fudge had been poured on top of that, but you know, complaining about too much chocolate is ridiculous.

I don’t want to be the lone naysayer when it comes to the place, but I want to give it to you straight–I think Shake Shack gets most of its accolades because it’s cool to like it. Much like Magnolia Bakery, there’s always a massive line outside the Shack, but Magnolia cupcakes really are better than any other cupcake in the city. (Well, at least the icing is.) With Shake Shack, it’s more that it’s in the middle of the the park and affords you the opportunity to eat a decent meal outside without cars whizzing the entire time like they do on the patio of a regular restaurant. Plus, New Yorkers love to talk about how “worth it” long lines are, because waiting around strangely makes things taste better.

I certainly like Shake Shack, and oddly, I think I romanticize the place more than anyone I know. I’m always asking Kamran if we can go there, because even if the food is just good, dessert in the park is great.

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The one review of the new Turkish restaurant Savarona that my boyfriend and I read before making our reservation complained that it’s “farther east than anyone should have to go in Midtown”, but we’re well-versed on 1st Ave. and rolled our eyes at that person’s lacking sense of adventure. And then we found ourselves lost on eerily industrial 59th Street, practically walking into the East River under the Queensboro Bridge.

We spotted Savarona’s empty private room first and thought uh-oh, but then the rest of the place came into view, and it was lovely: entirely glass front with two sets of wide open doors, gold lattices on the walls, and a polished black bar. The beautiful hostesses greeted us genuinely and enthusiastically, which is one of those small but important details for me, and the one who led us to our table asked if we had any problems finding the place, which I naturally lied about. I hated that we were seated in the back away from the windows despite the place being only half-full, but I suppose they were trying to spread everyone out. Our waiter met with us immediately and was very friendly, and aside from feeling like he was forcing drinks on us in the beginning–”I don’t really like wine”, I finally had to say–he continued to be attentive and informative throughout the meal.

This is entirely faux-serious.

We went with the $70 chef’s tasting menu against my wishes, because there were two courses where the only choices were seafood-based, and I’m a total fish-phobe. My boyfriend, Kamran, guilted me into it, though, saying that he didn’t feel comfortable ordering it without me. Since each of the six courses had two offerings, we decided to share one of everything and got a few surprises along the way. The first was a plate of what looked like falafel and hummus but turned out to be a meat croquette and babaghanoush.

The croquette (a word that I’ve never in my life used before this moment, by the way) had a super-crunchy skin and this chili sauce that I want to eat on every meal from now on. I didn’t see it elsewhere on the menu, so if you don’t go for the tasting menu, find a way to finagle it from your waiter.

Our first course included a plate of jumbo langoustine with a little pile of mushrooms on one side and more babaghanoush on the other. I was wholly frightened by the word langoustine, let alone the actual sight of the big pinkorange shell, but after wrestling a hunk of it out with my fork and knife, I learned that it was actually very mild. And the ball of crab resting on top of it, covered in a tenticle-like crust that gave it the appearance of a tiny sea urchin, was even better.

The other plate, a modern mezze platter consisting of five small dishes, was much more up my alley: a cube of chicken salad with pine nuts, a very savory yogurt with mint garnish, grilled vegetables, a chilled red pepper salad with walnuts, and grilled cold eggplant. It was all delicious, but the chicken salad and the yogurt were real stand-outs. Kamran and I were using our bread to scoop out as much of the yogurt as we could, and I’m surprised we didn’t use our tongues to lap it off the sides of the bowl.

Our second course was a smoked salmon roll filled with sliced avocado and topped with feta, chives, and red caviar. Although I’ve found recently that I actually sort of enjoy raw salmon, smoked salmon was a little too fishy for me to eat without masking the flavor with a lot of avocado, and you know I plopped that caviar on the side of the plate and made Kamran eat it.

The second plate was a stuffed mackerel roll with a bready skin, a topping that Kamran referred to as “micro salad”, and fried pine nuts. The mackerel was much less fishy than the salmon–although my anti-fish brain made me scrape off the bits of silver that clung to its edges–and was flavoured with something slightly sweet that Kamran first thought was cinnamon but may have been from the currants mixed in. The red pepper emulsion was what really made the dish, though, just as the spicy mustard made the salmon plate. Even as a fish-hater, I was impressed with how well the sauces complimented the seafood flavor.

Our third course was the one I really dreaded, because one plate was a fish called umbrina that I’d never heard of before, and the other plate was a KING PRAWN. Seriously, who thought it was a good idea to put the word king in front of anything having to do with the ocean? The waiter put the umbrina down in front of Kamran, and I thought I was going to have to throw a fit, but then I saw that prawn on my plate was really just a big shrimp and not at all the bug-eyed crayfish-like creature that I’d expected. I played it cool while Kamran dug around in the parchment paper bowl that the umbrina was cooked in

and took a tiny bite of the sole on my plate, which was covered in some sort of yellow sauce so bland that I can’t muster a guess as to what was in it. The sole was flaky and incredibly moist, just as Kamran said his umbrina was. But not really caring for the texture of it, I kind of pushed it aside and took a bite of the risotto under the prawn, which turned out to be wonderful. Al dente, mixed with chopped basil, with fresh basil leaves on the side. To really go for the gold, I chopped off the very tip of the prawn just to say that I tried it, and to my surprise, it was . . . delicious. It had a meatier, less chewy texture than a small shrimp, with a grilled flavor that I didn’t expect at all.

I kept saying to Kamran, “You can’t even imagine how good this is!”, and he kept saying, “The rest of the world has had good shrimp before, Katie.” It was so good, though, that it actually caused me to use the word tasty, a word that I despise almost as much as the word panties. I eventually had to cut off the tail and make Kamran hide it behind his bowl, though, because the moment I thought about it as seafood, I wanted to spit it back out.

The fourth course, which was clearly designed especially for my palate as a reward for making it through the previous two courses, was a plate of two different cuts of lamb and a plate of wild duck confit. I started with the lamb chop and loin, which were cooked just the right amount for me, and even if the chop hadn’t been as flavorful as it was, I still would’ve loved it just for its shape. The loin was little tough for me, but the dollup of young zucchini puree topped with fried potato straws beside it was delightful; so much so that I kept eating it long after I passed the plate to Kamran.

The duck confit was supposed to be caramelized, but Kamran and I didn’t notice it, maybe because we were too busy dipping it in the rich honey and black grape sauce smeared on the side. It almost overwhelmed the duck, but I don’t mean that as a complaint. There was a pile of mushrooms hidden inside a criss-crossed shell of potato fondant that Kamran said tasted like nothing and I thought tasted slightly like pound cake. We decided it was just there for looks.

Another little off-the-menu surprise arrived in the form of a saffron-flavoured jelly that our waiter referred to as a “sorbet”. The texture was somewhere between pudding and Jell-o, the taste was clean and refreshing, and the collection of nuts and currants on top was a nice addition, especially the pistachios. The presentation–a juice glass in what looked like a heavy brass measuring cup–was also very impressive, if you exclude all of the stains I made on the table cloth.

Kamran’s dessert was a cherry bread with an almost-savory vanilla cream, black grapes, mint leaves, and a wild sugar concoction on top that resembled the hair of a treasure troll. The bread was extremely moist, and the grapes were so delicious that I wished I’d eaten them one at a time instead of packing them in together, but overall, the dish was barely sweet at all if you discount the strands of sugar. It was perfect for someone like Kamran who gets easily overwhelmed by sweet, rich foods, but it would have been a let-down for me.

My dessert, on the other hand, was probably the most impressive one I’ve had in New York thus far. The bottom layer was a thick-cut slice of baked pineapple. Then there was a layer of THE most delicious vanilla cream I’ve ever had. Then a thin slice of dried pineapple. Then a scoop of peach sorbet stuck with a sprig of mint. Then that crazy sugar nest again.

It was such a positive experience overall that the things that let me down weren’t such a big deal, but for a well-rounded review, I should mention the following:

1) As someone who can give or take mushrooms, I was disappointed to see them in almost every dish. They were always done well and always looked nice, but I never felt like they added much to the plate.

2) The menu didn’t always deliver what it promised. There was supposed to be some interesting foams on a couple of dishes, for instance, and either they weren’t there, or we couldn’t distinguish them from what was happening on the rest of the plate. And there was supposed to be Turkish Delight served with our very delicious coffee and tea, and while the surprise saffron cup was welcome, we were really interested to see if the Turkish Delight was any different than the kind we buy in cardboard boxes at the candy store. All of this would have been fine, of course, if we hadn’t expected it after seeing the menu.

3) In a couple of cases, we felt like the chef had focused more on technique than taste. The potato fondant shell is the best example of this; it looked cool and probably took some skill, but it didn’t taste like a whole lot to Kamran, and I didn’t care for the stale cracker consistency.

The bill was outrageous by my standards–nearly $200, and I didn’t even have any alcohol–but I was delighted by something in every course, the portions were very large, and the dessert couldn’t have been better, so it was well worth the money for me. Especially since I wasn’t paying. (Thanks, Kamran!) I would definitely go back again for the atmosphere, for the service, for the risotto and prawn, and for that wonderful pineapple dessert.

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In an attempt to make millions off my website on the suggestion of my very supportive, non-blog-hatin’ friend Elise, I added a couple of Google AdSense ads tonight. I was feeling not-so-sellouty about the Japanese restaurant links that kept popping up on my sidebar, because I am, after all, trying to mold myself into the most-Asian white girl you know. But after editing an old post and reloading the page, I saw that one of the ads had become a photo of an attractive fat girl. I quickly scrolled down to my footer, and the big banner across the bottom had switched over to a spread for a BBW dating site. I’m convinced that Google saw a couple of pictures of me here and is trying to tell me something.

YOU CANNOT DISSUADE ME, GOOGLE. I WILL ONLY POST MORE PHOTOS OF MYSELF EATING TO SPITE YOU.

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I don’t like seafood. I don’t like that it’s been swimming around in a cesspool of its own feces, and I don’t like that it tastes like it. But when your boyfriend wants to gulp an entire plate of raw ocean animalia, you don’t argue; you make him take you to the Grand Central Oyster Bar.

The restaurant is underground, cavernous, monstrous, with huge arced ceilings tiled and lined with lights. It feels more like you’re at an expensive wedding reception than on a private date. It’s not really dim enough to be romantic, the tablecloths are a very small-town-diner red-checker, you can hear the slurps of the couple dining right next to you, and the clatter of silverware echoes off the walls. But for some reason, you feel really great being there. Really 1920s flapper-girl-in-a-string-of-pearls. You expect fat cats in suits and top hats to walk through the door any moment. But the unpretentious, jolly kind of fat cats.

The menu is amazing. If you like seafood. In a different life, I would’ve dove right into that caviar sandwich (because what isn’t good on bread?), and a jumbo lump crabmeat cocktail sounds like an alcoholic’s delight. Kamran was intent on our trying the bloody mary oyster shooter and splitting the bivalve platter, but since I can barely stomach the word “bivalve”, we settled on some New England clam chowder. Which was totally delicious, even before I added three bags of oyster crackers to it. It wasn’t fishy at all, and the clam didn’t have the rubbery consistency I expected.

I had planned to play it legit and order the half chicken, but Kamran convinced me that if anyone was going to do fish right, it was “America’s most historic and celebrated seafood restaurant”. So I ordered one of the specials, a sturgeon splashed with rum sauce and golden raisins, hoping that the rum would get me drunk enough that I’d forget I was eating the ocean. It came with some nice buttery vegetables to help clear my palate between bites to keep me from freaking out and this REALLY AWESOME RICE. I don’t have any idea what was in it, but it was a cheesy little ball of hearty warm nothing-else-I’ve-ever-tasted. And hey, the fish wasn’t bad, either. When I asked the waiter if he thought sturgeon was okay for a seafood-hater, he told me that it’s so mild there’s a dish called sturgeon cordon bleu. And he was right for the most part; the ends of the hunk were much thinner and were a little bit browned, and they were actually what I might call “delicious”. The middle was thick and moist, and although it didn’t really taste any different from the ends, the fact that I could see all of the meaty layers freaked me out, so I had to leave a bit of it behind. Still, I was obviously proud of myself:

When I finished, Kamran said that

a) it’s good I have no idea what a sturgeon looks like, or I would’ve been too scared to eat it, and

b) he, a seafood fanatic, wasn’t sure he would’ve had the guts to try it. YES!

And speaking of guts, Kamran ordered the medley of shellfish and ended up being a little overwhelmed by the huge plate of oysters and clams arranged from smallest to largest, mussels, and giant shrimp.

He had been really excited about eating clams after having stealing a really good one from his sister’s plate the last time we were at Balthazar, but the clams on this plate weren’t cooked, and his stomach wasn’t quite prepared for that after a childhood incident involving bad clams that made him sick. The oysters were a suckin’

slurplin’

swishin’ good time, though, and he liked everything else on the plate so much that he had a hard time deciding what to save for last. Although he did spend the rest of the night feeling like slimy things were swimming around in his stomach, so I felt vindicated.

Overall, I’d say the food must be pretty great if the anti-seafood-est person alive was able to handle it with a smile, and the atmosphere was neat if not dark and romantic, and it was the sort of experience that you feel like you can only get in New York. And that’s what it’s all about.

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THE LUTHER BURGER!

Kamran: Apparently it’s named for Luther Vandross, who apparently loved these.
me: OMG!
Kamran: Do you understand what’s going on there?
me: Is that sausage or beef? ‘Cause sausage would ALMOST make sense to me.
Kamran: Beef. It’s a hamburger.
me: Bacon and cheese?
Kamran: Hamburger with bacon and cheese on a glazed donut bun.
me: Should we try it?
Kamran: No. Luther Vandross is dead.
me: Yes, but . . . I want to die having lived a full life, Kamran.
Kamran: A full life doesn’t require a hamburger with a glazed donut bun. Just like it doesn’t require shooting up heroin.
me: Then what DOES it require, huh?
Kamran: Might feel good, but it fucks you up.
me: Kinda like my love.

Whilst reading my dear friend caropal’s latest entry today, I was reminded of a day a couple of months ago upon which I wore a rather low-cut shirt to work and was very surprised to look down at one point and notice an unfamiliar mole on my chest. I spent the rest of the afternoon wondering how one could go her whole life with a dark black spot featured prominently on her front and never pay it any mind, and I became very concerned that I was missing other important features of my body. Like, say, an extra ear or mysteriously braided armhair.

I went home that night and stood in front of my mirror, just looking at the thing in unamused awe. Angry at it for confusing me, I took my fingernail and scraped at it, thinking it might be a weird scab of some kind. It came right off and left absolutely no mark behind, which confused me even more for a second before I remembered that I’d had some dark chocolate after lunch that day. I realized that a hunk of it must have melted and dripped onto my boob, where it lounged all day while my co-workers walked past it thinking, Wow, what slob.

So to enact revenge on it, I popped it in my mouth. Dee-lish.