For 11 years, June Jo Lee, an ethnographer, has been traveling the country, talking to Americans about how they eat. She has often been in offices, observing white-collar workers. In one interview, a 20-something administrative assistant at an architecture firm in Seattle told her, ‘‘I don’t think I ate at a table at all this week if you don’t include my desk at work.’’ In Chicago, Lee talked to an I.T. specialist who lunched in front of his computer and assiduously avoided the break room; anyone who ate in there was odd. Another guy said that each week he would bring in a crudité party platter from Costco and graze from it when he got hungry…After all her conversations, note taking and analysis, Lee summarizes her findings like this: ‘‘The way people eat at work is pretty sad.’’
i have mixed feelings about eating lunch at your desk. i did / do it 99.9% of the time, but mostly because taking a break from work — like a real break — makes it very difficult to go BACK to work. eating at my desk kept me in the current. the end of this article talks about eating and making lunch with colleagues as a healthy work strategy, which sounds cool in theory, but also sort of terrible, like more work, like please when do we get to make our own choices and not relate via work and can’t we just be free beings who maybe sometimes choose a costco crudité platter.
just remembered that i had a dream that we found clyde’s kong. what a cool dream. also ross is out of town and i have so much work, so i moved the TV into my work room so i can just watch forgettable TV in the background while i work. “livin the dream.” it makes work so much more pleasant, like i’m casually working while doing something else. also it feels like i have friends over that i don’t have to talk to.
in other news, i finished the mindy project on hulu and it is indeed a strange show but i am into it because of its sometimes brilliant jokes and emo beating heart. although why did they hire the terrifying scary mutilator actor from deadwood to play the new doctor? he’s actually not bad but the terror memory. their male casting choices are a bit painful, with the exception of danny, and ike barinholtz, who is incredible.
also i put this in my amazon cart the other day, WILL IT GET BOUGHT
obviously very into this. lately i’m like, eat whatever you want at any time and just do yoga or eat kale once a day, or not even do that. do whatever you want. i was listening to this podcast and Virgie Tovar was on and she is awesome, just really into her message: throw away the scale, enjoy life, life is so short (that’s sort of my own paraphrase). in ice cream news, when i was a kid, i would go stay with my dad and we would go to walgreen’s and my stepmom, dad, and i would each get a pint of bluebell ice cream. i would get my own pint!!!!! i was 6 or 7. probably 6? i mean, WHOA.
i guess it’s a simon and garfunkel kind of day. ps. i binge watched all of LOVE this weekend. after a few episodes i felt kind of drunk, i think it was a combo of blowing off work + rom/com episodic television, which does secretly make me giddy, but then it dissipated. i used to read lesley arfin’s blog back in the DAE (my new spelling of day) so i feel some kind of old school familiarity/kinship with her, but [shrug]. can’t recommend, can’t NOT recommend.
me (image courtesy of here)
