Daily Archives: August 10, 2019

Day 47: Secret Menu Item 4!

Wow, two secrets in like a week. I really spoil you guys.

Okay this secret I didn’t even know about until our server kindly tipped us off.

So for the second time on this crusade I’ve ordered the soup as my side instead of the salad (2/47 is about 4-5% for you mathematicians). It’s a rare thing not just because I’d rather eat soup than salad, but also because Chrissi usually wants soup (minestrone) and so I get salad as to be able to supply the whole family with salad.

But Chrissi didn’t want soup this time, so I was free to order it for myself. I went with the chicken gnocchi because it’s like a bowl of cream and chicken and complicated potato, and all those things sound good.

Yet when my soup came out, it turned out to be a secret menu item!

Instead of creamy chicken gnocchi it was just creamy chicken.

The server apologized and said he would bring me another bowl as soon as the kitchen had gotten the next round going. It seems that this present bowl was at the tail end of the last round of soup, and it was all gnocchied out. I said thank you, not ironically, not because I felt strongly about this one way or the other, but because it gave me something to blog about.

So that’s the secret: if for some very specific reason you’d prefer he chicken gnocchi soup without the gnocchi, all you have to do is arrive at the moment when the last batch of soup is very low and the next one isn’t quite ready yet. (He did bring me a new bowl of soup after that.)

That’s the thing, though: if you force yourself to think over and respond to the events and actions of your day, you see things differently. I, desperate for blogging content, will prefer any possible deviation from the norm to having everything be perfectly standard.

So if you want to see just how much you can become absorbed in pointless details, just commit to blogging every single time you do something. You’ll become an expert in some kind of minutiae, and that seems to be what our time is all about.

Item 1: Cavatappi (mixing it up!), five-cheese marinara (whoa, slow down there, wild man!) and meatballs (oh, okay, that’s normal)

Breadsticks: 3

Weight: 168

Time: right in between two vats of soup

Day 46: Pass

This one is just an attempt to pass the time. And, later, the pasta.

It’s good to have goals, like blogging every pasta event. But at some point the goals are no longer serving you, but mastering you.

I’ve definitely reached that point in this log series.

There’s some guy out there who does his own Pasta Pass blog and gets a pass every year, as far as I can tell. It might sound good to the outsider, but even at this rate that we have managed–roughly once a week over the course of almost 11 months–it’s almost a punishment to come to this place and eat the same food again and again. And this other dude does it like every day. For years.

In our time, if you want to get noticed, you have to push to the extremes. Nobody cares that you went to Olive Garden 50 times in a year. They’ll say, call me when you hit 500 times. This is natural, as society has gone from the 50 people who live within a few miles to encompassing the 500 million people in North America.

I realized pretty early on with this project that there was an upper limit on just how many times I could or would go to the same restaurant. Even if it was right next door, it would have been hard to maintain the pace we began with (3-4 times a week). And yet with all the people in this nation, there’s somebody out there hitting that pace without a Pasta Pass. Just by the law of averages.

No matter how much things seem to change in our lives, we’ll always float back to our median. It’s impossible to live too long in the high or the low, or to be too generous or too tight-fisted for very long. It’s too hard to be happy or sad forever, or to work too hard or relax too often for very much time at all.

So this is just to say I couldn’t have blown you all away with this project even if I’d worked at it harder. This is my median: maybe one Olive Garden trip a week.

I will not be purchasing a Pasta Pass for next year, either. Got to float back to normalcy.

Item 1: linguine, mushroom Alfredo, breaded shrimp

Breadsticks: 3

Weight: 168

Times I’ve questioned my life choices: at least 46