fiesta, siesta, whatever. just get it over with. lunch time has gotten progressively worse as we've gotten older. remember in middle school when lunch was the time to run around the yard and engage in tether ball beat downs and pink elephant genocide? middle school lunches, when the best thing to do was to go to the cafeteria, grab your corn dog and creamed crap and swallow it down as fast as possible in order to hit the yard homie dork style? hell, lunch time was great even before middle school. in elementary school you were pretty much going home by lunch time. lunch was pretty decent during high school too. a nice extended break to chat with friends, play basketball, go to the taco bell or, if you were like me, play video games in the computer lab. and during college, lunch was a great optional meal of the day, the one available to you sometime between post getting up and pre getting dinner. although half the people i knew in college wouldn't have known where to find lunch if it was brought to their bedside table at noon, it was still an appreciated option. in college, "lunchtime" was synonymous with "start of classes." unless you were one of those crazy morning people. you know who you are.



but now that i work, lunches are just a burden. you get all hungry by eleven and look forward to this one hour break in which you have the chance to rush out to scavenge for food. you sit there at eleven fifty three, wondering if the boss will notice if you leave seven minutes early in order to get a parking spot at the food court. and then you stand in line with your business casual wondering what all these other business casually attired people do business casually. and then you get jealous of all the people attired in just plain casual, because obviously they are more comfortable than you are.



then you fork over your five dollars for the meal of the day, usually some fast food or seven eleven hot dog super combo. and then you try to eat everything at your desk to avoid co-workers and conversation, or maybe eat outside because it's nice and you've haven't seen sunlight all morning. and maybe, just maybe, you happened to bring along some fruit or some candy as a special treat for being such an industrious little worker bee. um. sugar never tasted better. you feel like you really really deserved to reward yourself with that candy. you feel on top of the world. like a new man. but then you have to go back to the office for another four hours of work. plus you will eventually have to fight or succumb to the dizzying effects of food coma.



what the hell.



doesn't this seem wrong? the whole monotony of lunch? in order to conserve money, most people bring or buy the same crap day after day. or maybe they'll mix it up on tuesdays for some variety. say, carl's jr instead of mcdonald's. whoop de fucking doo. i've worked out the numbers, the economics of lunch if you will. if i spend five dollars on lunch each day, that would be one hundred dollars per month. one hundred dollars -- roughly 5-7% of my income -- on eating while i'm supposedly making money! and i'm not paid for lunch! so each meal i buy at work i'm losing money! is this not an atrocity? do we need a referendum on this? a constitution? lunches should be free. sure in middle school and high school we had to pay for lunches, but that's because it was a fun time. lunch at work is not fun. it's a break from work so looking at it relatively, it's "fun", but really, it's not that much fun. the one hour time limit, the crowds, the m.s.g. saturated foods. it's all so wrong.



and is there nothing sadder than watching forty year old grown ass people eating the same lunches you were eating at the age of fifteen? one piece of fruit, one cold soggy sandwich, one juice box, and maybe a bag of chips. we're working for twenty years to achieve the same level of lunches that we had as teenagers? no way. i object. sure it conserves money to bring lunch to work and to bring leftovers but it's just sad man. very very sad. the only remedy to not having sad lunches is to be given large expense accounts to buy real meals with. but then real meals lead to food coma and extreme unproductivity. it's a no win situation.



this is why i choose to nap at lunch. because no other option makes any real sense. it's just depressing.