Out for lunch...

I always expect lunch like a school student in a math lecture. It is the days like today that stir up trepidation in me that I might stop relishing these small pleasures on an otherwise packed work schedule.

It is very rare that I decide to do something healthy and I have always regretted these decisions. Today was no exception.

They tried to convince me that it was GARDEN SALAD, but still I was not very happy eating a box of leaves. The box was deceptive. Across the glass counter I saw cucumbers, carrots, 2 cherry sized tomatoes and half an egg and it seemed a reasonable deal. But realization hit me like a bolt from the blue when I opened the box to find that its contents were not homogenous. Veiled away beneath the seemingly attractive dressing was half a pound of leaves, in Technicolor. Leaves in Green, Yellow, White, Orange and trust me Violet. I spooned through the bowl tring to find the other half of the egg, but with no sucess.

But I have to give myself full credit for being prudent under such trying circumstances. I fought the instinctive urge to gobble up the 1/2 egg straightaway. An instinct I learned to overcome the hard way. The moments of torture when my sister would leave the cherry on top of her ice cream till the very end whereas I would eat up mine at first and regret it for the rest of the bowl. This time the move was more tactical. I would eat the egg in the very end, that way my burp wouldn’t smell of Chlorophyll.

I felt shy and maybe ashamed of what I was eating. I could hear those unspoken comments from the diners on the adjacent tables. "Hey.. look at the guy eat the green thing..." ; "Oh my god!!! he is really eating that...". But one very wide grin belonged to a guy in a cowboy hat. A grin that expressed sheer contentment. "You fell for the name didn’t you??? I did too last week... Boy I am not the only fool around ... *Chuckles*"

As I walked to the lab after the traumatic lunch, I was trying to convince my conscience tat I had only said "Char grilled Chicken Sandwich" but it was the deaf girl behind the counter who got it wrong. If all this pain wasn’t enough I had to walk into the lab right after my Chinese friends had finished their lunch of what I guessed to be "Raw fish in assorted pond scum".

My stomach started to turn and the bile began to rise up into my mouth. I struggled hard and stifled a puke. I didn’t want to flush down the sink all the vitamins, carotenoids and the other supposedly good stuff that I had worked so hard to eat. I hurried out of the lab, pumped the fetid smell out of my lungs and counted to 200 for the smell to dissipate. I had a few mints before I returned, at least that way I could smell my minty breath instead.

It is not everyday that you become so philosophical about having lunch. Thats when you know something is wrong. Maybe I am working too hard....