Reading: Little Men

Moving: Not much

19 April 2000: Little Men

For no good reason at all I am ravenous at 3:15. Perhaps it's because I had an early lunch. But it was a sizable lunch.

I went out for Vietnamese food with two coworkers. I seldom eat lunch. I seldom go out to eat at lunch (I usually eat at my desk or outside). I seldom have Vietnamese. And I seldom go out with coworkers. I was glad to break my usual habits.

When we left the office, the temperature had plummeted from the morning (when it was sunny but windy) and we were all ravenous and chilly. Walking down California Street to Chez Thuy Hoa, we faced the Convention Center, which hulks at 14th for the two blocks flanking California. From the Convention Center's front steps, the view features a large parking lot and the sleaze end of California: two cheap hotels, a check-cashing establishment, this restaurant (much nicer on the outside than the inside), and pizza by the slice. Very appealing for visitors.

I had a combination seafood platter with a heap of rice and a bowl of rice soup. I am not much of a one for soup, but this was a) fast and b) hot, which were c) all I could ask for. When the main plate arrived, I ogled. Peppers, squash, baby corn, bok choy, tomatoes, mushrooms, a few scallops, a few shrimp, and two green-lipped mussels around a steaming heap of plain white rice.

Oof. As I wrapped myself around that, I considered that without the good influence of my coworkers I would have probably got a tomato panini from the Corner Bakery, much higher in fat and much lower in nutrients. I managed to hijack the nutritive value of my lunch by dousing the rice in soy sauce after I'd let it suck up all the stock, but my blood pressure's very low and I hope I drink enough water to flush out some of the sodium I'd poisoned myself with.

It was delicious.

Überboss suggested a magazine called American Bungalow and instead of Corner Bakery I might have gone all the way down to Tattered Cover LoDo in search of it, but instead we popped into the Barnes and Noble between Chez Thuy Hoa and Dot Org. This had every other magazine under the sun except American Bungalow, and instead of books (no more books until after closing!), I bought two cards, one for my cousin who's had her third (and, she says, last) child and another for my grandmother. Does buying cards from a chain count against my karma?

Almost all the way back at work, my coworker said she always craved something sweet at the end of a meal. I thoroughly understand that craving and foresaw a bag of peanut butter M&Ms in my future. She got a Dark Chocolate Dove Bar.

So I've eaten all that (not her Dove bar) and I'm still hungry. My water jug is still a third full, though, and allegedly feelings of hunger are often what we mistake thirst for. So I'm chugging down my water.

Yesterday I went to the library and got three more Amber Brown books, and Baby Island, two more Zilpha Keatley Snyders (I must have read Witches of Worm, but it didn't sound familiar, and Blair's Nightmare, but I've never found the first books in the Nid series), and Little Men and Jo's Boys.

I didn't read Little Women until 1994 (I was 26). It was too frilly for my hoydenish youth, and I read it then only because now I knew a little more about Louisa May Alcott and the whole incestuous tribe of 'em up there in Concord. Now I'm reading Little Men because Beth likes it and because I read somewhere that John buys it. I could get through Little Women's smarmy style because I figured I was reading the book deliberately. Little Men I'm reading as if it were a school assignment; if I get through the first three chapters I'd better have an antidote nearby.

Remember, OMFB, how Little Town on the Prairie begins with Miss Wilder trying to teach a kinder, gentler school, and no one can stand her because these frontier folk don't hold with such coddling? I can imagine Miss Wilder having read Little Men and deciding she will be Mother Bhaer.

I don't know why I make this association, but I picture John's death--if indeed he does die--as like Marc Antony's: in Meg's lap he expires, "I am dying, Egypt, dying."

Meg being so like Cleopatra.