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March 30, 2004
Soy delicious
A half-pound of soy chicken is roiling in my bowels.
Megan's birthday is also St. Patrick's Day, so every year I go to her birthday party as an escape from any St. Pat's-related debauchery. It's also the one time a year I see her. We were friends in high school and attended the same downtown artsy magnet school for half of every weekday. She took the drama classes and I was in the writing program. Now she's portraying a male porno crew member in a play called "The Coming of Dick," and I write about one paragraph a month on my own website. The Educational Center for the Arts: building tomorrow's artists today. (Actual slogan.*)
This year, Megan's birthday dinner was at "Red Bamboo," an annoying vegetarian place in downtown Manhattan. Since I last saw her -- one year ago yesterday -- she has "acquired a boyfriend," as she puts it. Her boyfriend is about ten years older than she is. Which is fine. We live in a nation built by pretty young ingenues who hook up with scruffy old headband-wearing types. To complain about such hook-uppery is to find fault with what makes you and I Americans.
When our friend Andrea brought in her 40-year-old sweetheart, it became clear to me that I will remain unappealing to women my own age until it's no longer possible for me to wear Atari shirts without looking like an idiot.** Here's how it works: girls in their twenties consider guys of their generation "immature," so they look to the presumably greater emotional and financial security of their elders. It doesn't help that most of the chicks I know have been abandoned, abused, or sold into slavery by their fathers, so they need some daddy-type to fill the gaping voids in their souls.
On the other side of the coin, guys in their forties will take anything they can get under thirty. When you're within shouting range of a "Sexy Grandpa" bumper sticker, you're going to cling to your youth any way you can, even if your only handhold is pushing 250 and has acne.
I spent most of the evening spinning these thoughts around in my head like depressing "Chinese health balls." My only distractions were Megan's flamboyantly gay friends asking me about "I Love the '80s" and an immense serving of bizarre food. Red Bamboo specializes in meat-fakery. All their meat-mocking menu items are given actual meat titles, and it's only in the descriptions that the prefix "soy" rears its organic head. So -- when would I get the chance to do this again? -- I ordered the "chicken parmigiana," disappointingly qualified as "soy chicken" in the description. Here's what I learned: you can fry anything and smother it in tomato sauce and mozzarella and it will kind of seem like chicken parmigiana until you eat it.
I even ordered dessert: vegan strawberry shortcake. I'm an idiot for thinking I was going to get decent strawberries in March. And because they couldn't use butter or anything that actually tastes good in a vegan dessert, they pumped it full of sugar. Lots of sugar. More sugar than any human should ever be confronted with.
After almost an entire soy chicken and three bites of fake-ass strawberry shortcake I was unable to speak or move. Unfortunately, I was still able to think... and regret.
----
* Not really.
** Already not possible.
Posted by tony at March 30, 2004 12:00 AM
