I wrote about idiosyncracy, I’ll give you some more. This time shall center on restaurants.
Restaurants are a nice shot of variety in my meals but not generally worth the increased price of eating. One fashion this comes up is in the specific absences that lightly grate on the experience. Consider the time preparing our food. It is nice that they do cook our food after we arrive, it tastes better and I cook on our barbeque to know that the delays everywhere are about realistic. Obviously conversation is a good way to spend it because – unless you eat in shifts – the conversation ought run down when you are filling your pie hole. The traditional answer is a cheap appetizer: bread (or by theme, chips).

I appreciate this custom but it sits far off the optimal solution. Bread is rather filling and plain. The semi-exotic food (higher quality, whatever) brought me here; wasting (internal) space feels foolish. In contrast, restaurants seldom serve vegetables in a fashion I prefer. Cooks (implicitly) cater to the middle-aged populace by drizzling dressing on them or grilling them. Mind, some dishes combine them well: pasta (Italian or Chinese) with broccoli or some such legume will draw no complaints. But, salads are right out.
This probably reflects my snobbery about ease of use. Most of the leaves in a salad are terribly hard to skewer and those that aren’t would stick out my mouth without biting the offender in half. Alternately, the preparation includes nuts, cranberries, or chunks of cheese that make a flavorful impression but are very difficult to bring in with the same scoop. In the end, I just eat salads with my hands and can only do so without any sinning dressing anyway. I’ll take an uncooked carrot over a “lettuce wedge” salad or grilled zucchini every time.

That is the first admission tonight, and the only one I actually practice. When I remember, I bring a carrot, wash it in the restaurant bathroom, and enjoy it while waiting for the real meat and potatoes.

So what do I do with the useless side of cut melon or boiled asparagus? Normally, I leave it for them to throw a way, an unnecessary waste. Otherwise the answer is asking for a container. There are areas of sympathy in my understanding that perhaps others substitute with different objects. For example, bent books and magazines distress me. People effect lasting damage on so many when a small inconvenience would preserve a text they could pass on or put back on the shelf without needing to squeeze it back in. So, I’ll admit that I don’t really like asking for a Styrofoam doggie bag. (Why is Styrofoam capitalized, Microsoft word? Its brand must have been denuded with the lapsed patent. It is not a sinning proper noun any more than “spandex” or “zipper.”) They don’t like giving it, because, like the bread, they don’t charge for it. Which, like airline soda, justifies increasing the universal prices in general. Frankly, I seldom need the whole thing, just enough for half a chicken breast or whatever. Only pastas are served in overwhelming portions and are worth reheating.

So, I realized it would be easier to bring a ziplock sandwich bag and save them the cost and myself the delay.
This last does not reflect a practice I would adopt so much as a better (yet impractical) logical extension of current practice. I barely use napkins. With exceptions (hand held greasy food), I can manage with utensils ably enough to keep my hands and face clean. But, that generally isn’t the practice with restaurant napkins. Everyone I know uses them as a bib, except not. Bib fits in the sense that it protects our clothes, though pants rather than shirt. While this catches crumbs well, if a patron sits close enough to the table the chest presents the likelier target for falling excess. Granted, many slouch forward rather than sit erect so I really mean myself. Yet, years ago I felt the foolishness of draping my lap while fearing more for my shirt. A better design would be longer so as to stretch from neck to inseam. Bowing to the poor posture of most customers, I admitted such a drape would need a small tie so it wouldn’t slip off. The joke is that I didn’t imagine what this would look like on a person. Instead, I described it as solution to the particular challenges of eating and wondered if any restaurant was so kind (profligate) as to offer such an article. Only much later, I realized this would be an apron and no one is going to take an apron to a wedding reception, haute couture be damned.

Not only does the general topic of this post resemble the last, it had roughly the same inception. Both were conceived well in advance of the proximate cause, an external, revealing link to relevant material. In the news post for the last page of Automotaton on Penny Arcade, Tycho delighted in and criticized the “seduction community.” He had a little argument with his artist Gabe and ended by declaring their goal solely physical intercourse. His veiled joke noted that men only interested in that aspect of a woman had already invented a solution devoid of the rest.

That link directs to a forty minute documentary about men who have bought (and two who service) Realdolls. I encountered the concept prior to hearing of the movie (but not yet watching) Lars and the Real Girl. Without seeing that probably begrudgingly sympathetic depiction, I had mostly shared the popular conclusion about purchasing a sex mannequin, until yesterday.

Some weeks ago, I read Slaughterhouse Five and looked it up on amazon for some reason. The site suggested We – by Yevgeny Zamyatin. That book stands as a precursor to Orwell’s 1984 in theme and setting. Skimming on its page turned up We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love by Robert Johnson. He has written a series of short psychological illuminations of men, women, the shadow aspect, and so on via interpreting mythological and literary classics. (We centers on Tristian and Isolde.) While the concept intrigued, I decided to test Transformation: Understanding the Three Levels of Masculine Consciousness. (One more step before I loop back.)

This iteration deviates a bit by correlating three books to his (Jungian) aim rather than a single work. Johnson means to evoke the mindsets at the heart of the simple man (Don Quixote), the complex man (Hamlet), and illuminated man (Doctor Faustus). Happiness and engagement with the outer world distinguish the three. The simple man is happy ignoring his circumstances. The complex man has learned much about our world but can no longer draw peace within it (Al Gore). The “four-dimensional man” abides happily in a worldly understanding and vivacious inner life. Such, at least, is his thesis and I have only yet read the chapter about the simple man.

Under Johnson’s searchlight, Cervantes’ character suitably embodies the self-sufficient spirit. He meets whores and reimagines them as court ladies and his beloved Dulcinea. He steals a barber’s shaving basin because it is ‘actually’ the golden helmet of Mambrino. Johnson delights that Cervantes even protected him from defeat. When Don Quixote bounces off the famous windmill, he claims his sorcerous foe transformed them into such to deny him the honor of victory. The simple man, as Johnson portrays him, is unconcerned with external circumstance to derive his happiness.

This, to my surprise, was the perfect preparation for watching Guys & Dolls. The men depicted all surprised me with the amount of care they took in beautifying their ‘companions.’ This lifechoice lands them in the women’s clothing department and the makeup department as much as if they were women. Further, they treat them as though they are human to a degree. I was going to say one of the participants regarded them more ‘practically’ as “a masturbation aid,” but when given the chance, he served them dinner. One man spoke of his doll as asleep while acknowledging that he would need to exchange her face for one with open eyes later.

Johnson faults our society for encouraging and subsidizing the education to complexity to the point of distaining the simple man. Don Quixote isn’t stupid. Neither are these men who have bought simulacra. However, their pleasures and meaningful experiences spring whole cloth from their psyches. Even two days ago, understanding this difference would have largely been as beyond me as the director anticipated it for a general audience. With Johnson’s recontextualization, pity and revulsion evaporated.

Perhaps another argument helped me some too. A few months ago, I found the belligerent encyclopedia dramatica and that led to a brief defense of the fleshlight. A fleshlight is a fake vagina. The arguer took offense to the social indifference to a woman masterbating with a dildo but the ostratization of men using artificial props. I can’t despise him or [Lars] for concluding this is an easier and emotionally sufficient compromise in contrast to rejection. They are demonstrably happier for it. The alternative isn’t rape but there is no social purpose to a desperate loneliness that might have been their fate in an earlier time. But, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe they would bravely fashion an imaginative companion with ruder materials anyway.