Lunch With Friends

I don't think women leave their desks at work often enough and meet their friends for lunch. I don't sit at my desk and eat; but I do spend an ungodly amount of time in the breakroom, nose in a book, unthinkingly eating, enjoying little.

Today I went to meet Pam for lunch. This week was her birthday, and we've all been busy and haven't found the normal weekend time to celebrate her birthday. And if we try too hard, it's been known to get all complicated and nasty and very unenjoyable. Instead I was, "I'm going to buy her a book, damnit"--being Thank God, she likes to read more romances now--"and we'll go to lunch."

We met at Taj Mahal, an Indian restaurant. We hoped the food would be better than it had been at the other Indian restuarant. It was. It was awesome. It was beyond awesome. We talked, we laughed, we shared. She delighted in the fact I'd actually bothered to wrap her gift; and she cooed over the card I made her, even though I had shown her the card a couple weeks ago.

Then we started girl talking. You know the kind I mean. The kind you do out of earshot of boys because you'd get into massive trouble, especially if you're married to one of them. The talking that involves bad sex, bad dates, men who don't talk, romance novels, and on and on.

"I love my husband, but he does not talk like the men in these books." Pause. "Well, no man does...and it is fiction."

"You know, Christina Dodd says she writes men's dialogue by thinking of woman and then dumbing it down." Pam laughs so hard she covers her mouth--because I know her guilty Virgo butt is feeling bad she laughed.

"I love my husband, but he doesn't talk."

"Well, of course not. The man watches TV all the time. He has Eric for a brother. He never got a word in edgewise. He's quiet. You married the Quiet Man. This is not unusual."

"True. And don't get me started about him interrupting me while I read. He's watching the Chiefs play, so it's not like I can talk to him, but then he wants me to talk to him."

"You know why, right?" I say, ever the expert on men. "It's so he can tune you out while he watches the game. He's so used to doing that he can't watch the game without it." Pam's eyes widen at this new conspitorial truth.

"You're right!"

"So the solution," I say, "is to tape yourself talking, play that while he watches the game and you can read in peace. Plus if he says he didn't hear the last thing you said, you can just hit the rewind button. It's really a win-win."

"I like this tape recording idea."

"Oh! Oh! And in the bedroom, you can just have him read a script--and then you can play the recording as he does his thing." We fall over into hysterics. We're freaking hilarious, aren't we?

Then there is a discussion of a Geoduck. (If you don't know what it is, you need to Google it.) She had recently learned of what they are, but the guys at work explaining what they were couldn't do it--because in their words (the ones they COULDN'T say), it looks like a penis with a clam/oyster shell clamped on one end. Men. Everything looks like a dick.

I Googled this creature when I got back to work. I couldn't resist. You know what it looks like? It looks like an elephant trunk with an oyster shell clamped on the fat end of the trunk, or as I described to Pam later: it looks like an oyster swallowed an elephant but couldn't manage the trunk.

*Beevis and Butthead laugh* Heh-heh, I said swallow.

Pam said, "Well, the picture they showed, the trunk end was wrapped around the shell, that's why they thought penis."

"When in the history of penises have we ever known them to do that? In fact, I'm sure if I ever asked a man if he would or could wrap his penis around an oyster shell that would clamp down on the end--he would have bolted out of the room and called Men Abuse Hotline."

So the point of this blog is: go out and eat with your girlfriends. It's good for your health.