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Saturday, May 23, 2009

Rut Broken

Sixteen pizzas in seventeen days, a burger was a refreshing change of pace.

I have a friend, one of the best known psychics in the midwest (name two others, he says when challenged on this), eats the same thing every day. Same breakfast, 364 days a year. Same lunch, a sandwich made with two toasted slices of thin Aldi bread and a slice of Daisy canned ham. I think there's mustard and/or mayo on there. You can't buy this guy lunch, I've tried. He has to eat the same thing every day.



As he puts it, he knows how long his groceries will last, how long until he'll be hungry for supper after that sandwich, and on day 365, his birthday, when he hits the Chinese buffet, it seems really, really special.

It works for him, though it's nothing I'd want for myself. It's un-American.* But if you're going to make your living as a psychic janitor, these are probably pretty healthy rules to live by. It's not as if the option of buying groceries at Whole Foods instead of Aldi exists in that scenario, and he seems thoroughly happy with his lack of choice at lunch time.



So anyway, I don't eat the same thing every day even when it is all pizza. But I admit biting into a cheeseburger with fresh sliced tomato and alfalfa sprouts was pretty satisfying.

*In a previous job, I had conversations with a Jewish client in New York. He had a Goy secretary, and he told me she seemed to buy the same sandwich he did at lunch, but she didn't buy from the kosher deli. Her sandwich was less than half the price his was. 'Is mine better? I hope it's not worse,' he told me. And I had an epiphany: this is what it means to be unassimilated. Nobody who's fully American wouldn't at least try the other deli to find out if the sandwiches were identical. One unclean meal, sure, but at least you'd know. This guy had no interest in knowing, it just wasn't an option. The American fetish of choice just didn't phase him.

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