Me: Table for one, please.
Them: Would you like the counter instead?
Me: No I’d like a table for one.
Them: No waiting for the counter. Twenty minute wait for a table.
Me: But there’s three open tables by the bathroom.
Them: Well they’re for more than one person.
Me: But I’m here now.
I take the counter and grab my lower back as the stool is backless. I’m feeling discriminated against due to my singularity. I mean I can order a ton of food if that helps even the score. You see the brain tends to categorize things/people/situations automatically. A single person entering any environment intended for groups is suspicious.
Why are they alone? Are they obnoxious? Opinionated? Probably damaged goods.
I’ve never knowingly been viewed as a loner, yet with my better half winding down a transfer contract on the other side of the country I’ve turned into one. The making new friends part is his deal, not mine. I take a social backseat which is evidently the equivalent of a table for one.
I’ve even developed how to eat alone skills that I find essential to appear as less of a loser. I always bring my iPad to read the New York Times or The New Yorker. The Times is safer as some of the cartoons and Shouts and Murmurs in The New Yorker can turn into laugh out loud moments which make me appear not just lonely but crazy.
Oh he’s frigging nuts and that’s why he’s sitting alone laughing into an electronic device.
Worse than laughing while eating alone is going to the theater alone. When you have to make people stand up to get to your seat they usually remain standing anticipating your guest.
Umm yup … just me.
If it’s a comedy you laugh alone and if it’s tragic you cry alone. Crying alone is the lesser of two evils as when I find something funny I verbally commit to it.
Note: I tend to not find too many things funny as of late.
I’m also finding that cooking for myself and eating alone while watching CNN is even more pathetic. I have walls of windows in our new apartment and invariably someone is watching me from across the street. Or at least I think they are as I lower the shades. I wince every time I have to walk by the doormen. They know my comings and goings in detail. What must they think? I don’t have many. Comings and goings that is.
But it’s just a few more months until everything returns to some semblance of normal. Even my dog is counting the days. She’s growing tired of how clingy I’ve become.
It’s almost five o’clock and I’m weighing the pros and cons of going out for a martini. You see, if you eat alone you’re pathetic but if you’re drinking alone it’s easier. Then you’re just labeled a drunk.
That I can live with.