Another Night, Another Dinner, Another Chain Restaurant
Prior to watching Resident Evil Extinction, the third in the mind-numbing-barely-scary-Night of the Living Dead Lite series of survival horror flicks which I enjoy oh so much, Steph and I had din din at Johnny Carino’s in Anaheim. Steph, as usual, had pasta (of the bow tie variety) with Alfredo sauce, while I had JC’s “Spicy Romano,” which is fancy marketing for Steph’s dish with chicken, mushrooms and spices.
Steph’s food was watery and bland (I snuck a bite or six), and the Alfredo sauce lightly smothering her noodles was neither rich nor creamy. It honestly tasted like the instant Kraft Mac n’ Cheese stuff you can get at the supermarket. My “Spicy Romano” tasted a tad better, but no by much. This can be attributed to the large pearl-sized clumps of garlic buried within, of which I had the opportunity to inadvertently bite into several times throughout the night. At least the Bellini Steph ordered was good. Definitely made the rest of the food go down easier that’s for sure. Now I am not saying JC’s food was horrible, but the dishes we ordered were nothing spectacular either. As we finished up, I did eye another table who ordered some of their skillet grilled dishes which looked much more appealing, so maybe we simply made the wrong choices this time.
A topic of conversation that I brought up during dinner irked Steph a bit, and will probably continue to do so when she gets a whiff of this post. Making an observation that all her friends are married or engaged while my friends are single, I commented that they are more of a bad influence as a result. I presented as evidence the high likelihood that, when conversing with said married or imminently married friends, they would ask when it was my turn with Steph. Another example, while I was still working for the same company as Steph, would be her friends in the office letting her borrow their wedding or engagement rings to wear for the day, subtly making sure I noticed as I went about my business for the day.
My single friends (male and female), on the other hand, do not promote the merits of being single so proactively to her and I. It’s as if marriage is this wonderfully exclusive club that, once joined, permits you to recruit as many others as possible at every opportunity. Maybe it’s a mutually beneficial married couple thing. The first couple convinces two other couples to get married, and now the circle of married friends has expanded to three. Now if the two recruited couples each gets two other couples to get married, then they will benefit from a larger social group, as well as the original couple. Now that I think about it, this actually all sounds eerily familiar…
;]
- Wes
