Chopped salad

Click here for audio: Chopped salad

I was recently told that I do nothing. It will have taken you zero seconds to realize this was a domestic conversation.

 

It was.

 

It escalated fast and pretty soon I’d been accused of so many things it became funny. I don’t even have time to do the stuff I was accused of. Unless, of course, I do nothing.

 

But if I’m doing nothing, how can I be doing all the other stuff I was accused of?

 

I raised this point in my defense. You will not be surprised to learn it didn’t make things better.

 

The next day, post-row, I resolved to make lunch. It was a quiet demonstration that I had listened, and I was trying.

 

Trying.

 

Yeah. That’s been the word of the year so far.

 

Anyway, I made lunch. Being the radical fascist communist liberal pinko socialist zealot I am, I subscribe to the failing New York Times, one of the most successful newspapers in this still-young century. I don’t read it much, I confess. I’m too busy doing an impression of someone doing nothing. I mainly listen to the Daily podcast and occasionally – when doing nothing – I look idly at the recipes pages and imagine myself being the kind of person who could regularly cook such recipes.

 

A person doing nothing who needs to look like he’s doing something is well advised to cook.

Everyone benefits, even if they don’t immediately want to say so.

 

I made lime-ginger chicken. I wasn’t sure what to put it with, so I did what I always do in such a predicament. I made enough chopped salad to feed 40 wolves.

 

As I sliced and diced, I briefly considered slashing my wrists.

 

It would have been doing something.

Advertisement