Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

On My Blog Menu:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue

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Friday, December 28, 2001
13:23 - Lunchtime Musings of an Ex-Loner	(top)
So I'm eating lunch here in my cubicle. It's Friday of the week before New Year's-- most of the company is off on vacation, and the remainder of us have been spending the week catching up on e-mail and watching South Park. Not much is going on. A bunch of the survivors bunched up and went en masse to a Chinese restaurant today; I stayed back out of a personal dislike of Chinese food, but as I went out to forage alone, it occurred to me that this is the exception now rather than the rule. I briefly considered going to Burrito Real or Pizzeria Uno, on my own, but then I realized that I didn't have a book, and it's hard to listen to iPod music while you're chewing. I remembered how all throughout school I always ate alone. In junior high I spent every lunch hour in my science teacher's classroom, memorizing the naming schemes and mythological tie-ins of all the chemical elements. (I still remember most of them.) In high school I ate every day perched on the wall next to the sunken Tri, morosely watching the masses move about in their social groups. And I always had a book. These were the days when I would re-read The Silmarillion or the Herriot books for the nth time, memorizing those passages I already knew so well. Nobody ever bothered me; our arrangement worked out just fine. Lunch, for me, was a time for introspection and oblivion to the outside world-- not for socializing. When I got to college I had the sudden epiphany that I should try to get along with people-- after all, nobody knew me there, so I could start fresh. Well, it sort of worked. I made friends, but they tended to be losers like me too, even among the uber-nerds of Caltech, so I didn't make much of an impression as a social animal. But I didn't eat lunch alone. In Blacker we tended to eat lunch as a group on the steps of the courtyard, everybody staking out their claims without regard to personal allegiances or friendships. It was all just a big mass of bonhomie. Some heavy-duty loners ate in their rooms, but I decided at some point-- and I can't even remember when or how, or whether it was a conscious decision or not-- that I would not be one of them. Lunch as a social event wasn't so bad after all. And I'd read my last lunchtime book. So then after college I found myself heading out each day with a group of friends/co-workers-- often as many as four or five, but almost always at least one. We'd rotate between restaurants and eat where we all felt the food reflected the weather or the general mood. Sometimes we'd go to Togo's and just bring sandwiches back to eat here, but most often we'd spend a cheerful, raucous hour in some well-loved restaurant, trading stories, spilling food, developing new stories about spilled food. A lunchtime without companions now seems ludicrous. And reading a book at lunch is something I don't even remember that I can do. And that's why days like today feel so weird now. Morosely eating Taco Bell, reading InstaPundit and the daily comics, writing blog entries. It all feels like ten years ago. Because that's how long it's been since I thought like this.