"The next time you’re with a dining companion, consider what might be different if you were a party of one."

"While breaking bread together has its benefits, only dining with others means you’re missing out on one of the greatest joys of travel — eating alone at a restaurant. This is especially true while traveling, when it is easy to get immersed in a semi-predictable dialogue at the dinner table. There’s the rehashing of the day’s events, discussing details of tomorrow’s itinerary and lamenting how sore your feet are from walking on cobblestones. This isn’t a diss to your companion(s); it’s just the realities of traveling with someone else. Eating by yourself provides an opportunity to hone in on details as they happen — all in real time. You will be more likely to notice the intricate font on the menu or the server’s delicate placement of the bread basket on the table...."

Writes Chris Dong in "Dining solo is one of the great joys of traveling/No offense to your travel companions, but they’re holding you back from a culinary journey" (WaPo).

Most articles about dining alone are about dealing with the predicament of being alone and wanting or needing to eat in a restaurant. But this article has you contemplating an actual preference for being alone while you are with someone else.

It reminds me of that old LSD experiment where the doctor asks the subject — who seems to be having a sublime experience — "Is it all one," and she says "It would be all one if you weren't here." 

But isn't this always the problem with the company of others?

Orgasms and sandwiches.

From a post at Reddit about the 1973 book "Understanding the Female Orgasm" by Dr. Seymour Fisher:

something I found googling his name.... "Part of the early research leading to that book found that women who enjoyed food were likely to enjoy sex as well, and that put a twist into the Fishers' social life, Rhoda Fisher said. 'When we got to somebody's house for dinner,' she said, 'no women wanted to sit near him. They thought he'd analyze their food.'"

If I had to choose between an orgasm and like a really good sandwich, I'd pick the sandwich. I don't know what that says about me. 

Absolutely. If I had to live without orgasming for the rest of my life, I'd feel a bit sad and frustrated, but if I had to live without really good sandwiches, I would be undone...

Just yesterday, I complained on another post my orgasms are pretty meh so it was such an easy choice. Give me a fricken sandwich with everything on it!!

IN THE COMMENTS: Meade says, "And remember— you can’t fake a sandwich."

I google "marcel marceau eats a sandwich"... 

 

 ALSO: "Once I ate a hamster sandwich...."

AND: We all remember when Warren Zevon said "Enjoy every sandwich and you know what I mean by sandwich."

We're still here.

Happy New Year!

ADDED: My first wholly unnecessary self-imposed task of 2018 was to look up "survive" in the OED. You can see, without looking it up, that it is made out of the root that means "live" and the prefix that means "over," "above," "higher than," or "on top of." But it doesn't mean that when Mr. X survives Mr. Y, he's living a higher life. It means Y died and X did not.

"I did loue a Lady, But she is dead... Sil. Say that she be: yet Valentine thy friend Suruiues." That's Shakespeare, "Two Gentlemen of Verona." You can also survive some thing or the thing can survive you: "Yea though I die the scandale will suruiue." Also Shakespeare. "Lucrece."

So "survive" implies that something else died. Drudge's headline tells us that 2017 has died and implies, jocosely, that it aimed to kill us. Every year threatens to kill us, and many of us did not survive 2017.

But all who are reading the Drudge headline have survived, and perhaps, finding ourselves in this still-alive condition, we will back off on the hysteria that made 2017 so weird.

Some year out there — if not 2018, then one with a number that's not all that much more than 2018 — is going to kill you, and there's no sense degrading this year or any year with your raging morbid fears.

Lighten up. "Survive" has its "trivial use," the OED tells us, often in the phrase "I'll survive":

1902 R. Kipling Traffics & Discov. (1904) 30 ‘But it'll bore you to death,’ he says... ‘I'll survive,’ I says, ‘I ain't British. I can think,’ I says.
1928 M. Arlen Lily Christine xiii. 240 ‘All this trouble your silly husband has brought on you!’ ‘Oh, we'll survive that,’ she said lightly....
1958 ‘C. S. Forester’ Hornblower in W. Indies 184 ‘I don't envy you, frankly.’ ‘No doubt I'll survive, sir.’

That reminds me. My mother — who wanted to survive to "the year 2000" but died in 1999 — would often respond to complaints and alarmism with a deadpan "You'll survive." I wish I had performed what I now think is the best comic riposte and burst out in song:

"I like Steve, but you have to remember he was not involved in my campaign until very late."

"I had already beaten all the senators and all the governors, and I didn’t know Steve. I’m my own strategist and it wasn’t like I was going to change strategies because I was facing crooked Hillary.”

Said Trump, quoted by Michael Goodwin in a NY Post column titled "Trump won’t definitively say he still backs Bannon."

What struck me most was not that Trump is distancing himself from Bannon or — as I would put it — showing his own sensitivity over accusations that Bannon is somehow Trump's brain. What got me is that he's still saying "crooked Hillary." He's President of the United States. She's reduced to simple citizenship and resorting to posing in pink shoes to get attention. Why is he still hurling the epithet? Maybe it's part of the overall argument that nothing can change him....

I've got to be me was big campaign theme. The old Sammy Davis Jr. song just started playing in my head. I google Trump I’ve Gotta Be Me and get an article titled "Trump: 'I’ve Gotta Be Me'":

“You know, I am who I am. It’s me. I don’t want to change. Everyone talks about, ‘Oh, well, you’re going to pivot, you’re going to.’ I don’t want to pivot. I mean, you have to be you.”

That seemed like a perfect quote to add to this post, and then I kept reading the linked article and was amazed to see that he said that on the day he added Steve Bannon to his staff:

Later in the day came an announcement about the shake-up of his campaign staff.

Donald Trump, following weeks of gnawing agitation over his advisers’ attempts to temper his style, moved late Tuesday to overhaul his struggling campaign by rebuffing those efforts and elevating two longtime associates who have encouraged his combative populism.

Stephen Bannon, a former banker who runs the influential conservative outlet Breitbart News and is known for his fiercely anti-establishment politics, has been named the Trump campaign’s chief executive. Kellyanne Conway, a veteran Republican pollster who has been close to Trump for years, will assume the role of campaign manager.

Paul Manafort – who was ostensibly brought in to “professionalize” Trump’s campaign and image – will apparently stay on, but will obviously be boxed in by these changes....

So remember, Trump brought Bannon in because Trump wanted to be Trump and Manafort had been trying to change him. In that light, reread Trump's new statement. It's the same point: Trump is Trump and no one else's creation. Is that a failure to say he backs Bannon or just a restatement of what Bannon always was to Trump — a man who reinforces Trump's determination to be Trump?