Dining in the Dark

They say don’t knock it until you try it, but there’s a food fad that I won’t be participating in. Apparently there are some restaurants that are offering “dinner in the dark,” where customers eat their meals either blindfolded or in a pitch-black room.

They claim that not being able to see your food enhances the whole savory experience. This isn’t a blind taste test we’re talking about. It’s the whole meal. Although in the grand scheme of things, this sounds like a really stupid idea, I can’t think of a smarter place to take a blind date who turns out to be ugly.

Being a city known for its rich and stupid, Miami has at least one restaurant that offers this, and here is an explanation from their web site:

“A cavernous candlelit retreat, Catharsis lives up to its name, and the juxtaposition against the locale stimulates the senses immediately upon arrival, as all tension vanishes away. Arched white washed walls are adorned with warm, glowing wall sconces and soft dropped lights, while white tablecloths are sparkled with wild orchids.”

What a crock of shit. Are you having a meal or getting a massage by Yanni? Who writes the copy for their web site? A junior high creative writing class? I don’t think my tension is going to vanish. Quite the opposite, in fact.  I don’t know the owners of this restaurant, so I’m not going to trust them right off the bat. How do I know that they are indeed going to serve me the osso buco, and not some delicacy fished out of the cat box? Who are these restaurants kidding? This is just how they get rid of their spoiled food and stale leftovers and save on their electric bill. I also hear that after the waiter takes your order and puts on the blindfold, they force you to play pin the tail on the donkey until your meal is cooked.

I wonder: Does Catharsis offer carryout? Okay, I’ll sell you this food, but no peeking!

I have questions. If you’re blindfolded and order a nice steak, how are you supposed to cut your meat? Or do you just pick up the whole T-bone and eat it with your hands? Hopefully the rest of your party is also blindfolded, so they don’t have to witness the beef blood running down under your collar. Also, if you’re the kind of person who can’t stand it if your peas touch your mashed potatoes, this is not the place for you. Take your divided Melmac plate elsewhere.

Knowing the people with whom I routinely dine out, I would be in the middle of some delightful blindfolded dinnertime repartee, chatting away, only to find out that the rest of my party has quietly left the restaurant and stuck me with the bill.

Part of the fun of eating, I think, is enjoying the visual presentation of the food. If a chef doesn’t have to worry about what the food looks like, then he should be preparing okra puree for Gerber.

The web site tries, a little overzealously, to entice you to try the blind dining event: “Imagine the possibilities…the challenges…the excitement of tasting food you cannot see…not to mention…a very sexy experience.” The junior high creative writing teacher needs to teach her kids about ellipsis abuse (dot, dot, dot.)

If Helen Keller were alive today, I bet she wouldn’t be able to recall a single meal that was “sexy.” And probably not any sex act that was sexy. On the other hand, I can easily “imagine the possibility” of ending up with a few spoonfuls of ceviche in my lap and a spilled glassful of red wine on my new white shirt. And I can also picture the excitement of trying to remove black beans from my nostrils because I missed my mouth. I’m also pretty sure I would decline hot beverages with dessert, thereby saving me an embarrassing trip to the ER.

The restaurant is trying to get you to believe that blind people’s sense of hearing, touch, and taste are more vivid than their non-blind counterparts. Maybe that’s true, but it takes a long time for those senses to be honed. You don’t just walk into a strange restaurant, put on a blindfold, and expect to become super-aware. The website reads:  “Since your sense of sight is hampered, all of your other senses are on high alert.” So why not pinch off my other senses to make the food taste even better? Put a clothespin on my nose, tie my gloved hands behind my back and smear a strong topical anesthetic all over my body. I’m sure that would make a slice of Wonder bread taste like scallops provencal.

If restaurants really want to make a killing in the sensory deprivation market, they’d offer customers ear plugs instead of blindfolds. That way you wouldn’t have to hear the intimate details of your next-table-neighbor’s recent colonoscopy or the delightful, high-decibel squeals of her 2-year-old twin grandkids.

One positive thing that blind eating could do for you is to get you to try things you ordinarily wouldn’t touch. If you’re a finicky eater, you could go to a buffet where they blindfold you at the start of the line. They give you a big serving spoon and no plate. You just plop unknown food onto your cafeteria tray as you proceed to the end of the line. How else would you learn to enjoy strawberry-kiwi cheesecake with ranch dressing or Brussels sprouts with chocolate sprinkles?

I’m willing to try a variation on this blind dining theme. I’d like to dine at a really pricey restaurant where I can see, but the waiters are blindfolded. In addition to witnessing some fun slapstick entertainment (dropped platters, slip-and-fall accidents), I could get away with paying for my entire party’s meal with my Pet Supermarket rewards card.

I’d like to open a Chinese restaurant and serve blindfolded patrons. No forks would be allowed; only chopsticks. In addition to not seeing your food, you could also get it in your mouth.

I’ll call it Ming’s Eating Disorder Cafe. And as soon as word gets out in the anorexia community, I’ll be a millionaire.  

billwiley.blogspot.com by Bill Wiley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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The Org Org

There is a group called the National Association of Professional Organizers, and as soon as I find the link to their website buried somewhere in my 3218 ungrouped browser bookmarks, I’ll tell you more about it.

(2 ½ hours later)…

Ah, there it is. So NAPO offers a vast curriculum of pricey webinars to those who are interested in becoming a PO, a Professional Organizer. Here’s my favorite class, obviously a graduate level course:

Title: Chronic Disorganization: Understanding Emotional Challenges with the CD Client
Course #: PO-403W

This course will…help generalist organizers decide whether to pursue working with the CD population and, if so, learn how to further their education in that direction.

Cost: $129 for members/$229 for non-members

I wasn’t aware that CD was a human condition. Is this the result of a birth injury or premature birth, like cerebral palsy, or is it more of a congenital condition, like sickle cell disease? Are there support groups for the Chronically Disorganized population, or maybe a 12 step group?

Hi, I’m Bill and chronically disorganized (“Hi, Bill!”). It’s been three weeks since I left the cap off the toothpaste and a month since I left my underpants on the bedroom floor (raucous applause). Two days ago I bought a litter bag for my car, and this morning after I came back from a meeting, I got out of my car and got to the front door before I remembered I had forgotten to take the littler bag out of the car and empty it in the big can in the alley. I ran back to the car and grabbed the bag, and my heart was racing. I thought I might black out. Oh, God, this is so hard… Anyway, it’s been six weeks since I left a dirty dish in the sink, and my spice rack has been alphabetized for three months now. And next week marks the year anniversary when I last found a teaspoon mixed in with the soup spoons. I know all this because I keep a list. You know, the other day a friend of mine called me anal retentive, and I said, “But at least I’m organized,” but then I started wondering—and I’ve talked to my sponsor about this—if maybe I should check into anal rehab.”

I looked over NAPO’s website and was a little unsure if this was the right organization for me. On the surface, they look like they’re really organized. After all, they have save-the-dates for their 2015 AND their 2016 annual conferences, and we’re just halfway through 2014. On the other hand, there are dead links on their website that take you a place that says this: “Server Error, 404 File or directory not found.”

I’m thinking that instead of offering course # PO-302W, Downsizing with Senior Clients, they should instead create course # PO-001, Organizing Your Website So That Visitors Won’t Think Your Association Is A Sham.

And when you stop and think about it, what’s involved with Downsizing a Senior Client, other than walking in and saying, “You’re going to a nursing home. Throw out all your shit except for your clothes”?

What’s interesting is NAPO is not the only company that mentors you on how to become a professional organizer. You can get your PO certification at CertifiedProfesionalOrganizers.org after passing the $625 test. And there’s The Institute for Challenging Disorganization, which seems to do a lot of the same things that NAPO does, but sadly they only have a link to their 2014 annual conference. Get with it, ICD. Failing to plan is planning to fail! You’d think these groups would be a little more, uh, organized, and join together under one corporate umbrella so that disorganized people wouldn’t have to weed through a long list of organization organizations to choose the one that would show them how to pick out the right shoe racks.

Now, sure, I’d like to be more organized. I would love to not have to tear the house apart every morning to find my spectacles, but I don’t think hiring a professional organizer is going to fix that, unless I hire a live-in PO. And good luck finding one who would get up at 5:30 every morning to help me find my glasses. I have a hunch it’s in the Professional Organizer Bylaws that they all go to bed at 10 PM and get up at 6 AM and smooth out the bedspread, because they don’t unmake the bed when they sleep, because that just wouldn’t look structured.

Frankly, I don’t want to be that organized. I think it’s kind of tacky to whip out the label maker and designate drawers for wash cloths and toenail clippers. People who are organized with military precision become the butt of a lot of jokes. I used to work with a woman who placed precisely pre-sharpened pencils in her desk drawer, aligned by size, and everything on her desk had to be either parallel or perpendicular. There was no room for any other dissenting angles. People would always sneak into her office and put the long pencil next to the short pencil or offset her Post-It Note dispenser by a few degrees and then snicker from afar when she came back in her office and squared things up again.

I think Professional Organizers are part of that weird elite group of oddballs that celebrities hire, like personal shoppers, life coaches, emotional support dogs, post-cosmetic-surgery nurses, and ATM installers who put money machines in their kitchens. I read that Oprah has a staff member whose title is “Bra Handler” and Justin Bieber has someone on staff whose position is “Pizza and Drink Holder.” Try finding those job descriptions on Monster.com.

Many years ago I worked for a Fortune 500 company. They paid an enormous amount of money to hire consultants from Daytimer to get us better organized. Some well-appointed guy came in and gave us very expensive, gigantic organizer books with tabbed dividers for addresses, appointments, and to-do lists and all sorts of other information, I suppose, but I wasn’t awake for the entire presentation. During one of my conscious moments, he told us we should all leave at the end of the day with nothing on our desks. (I did that a total of one day.) Everything we needed, he said, should be filed nicely away in our pricey Daytimers. He then set us free with our posh books and warned us that he would be back in a month to check our progress. Fast forward exactly four weeks later to the minute, and we were again summoned to a Daytimer meeting, and everyone filed into the conference room with their slick books filled with things that are supposed to be important to people who take business seriously.

And then there was me. The boy who had somehow lost his organizer.

(Photo credit: daytimer.com)

billwiley.blogspot.com by Bill Wiley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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12 Step Program for Cat Fanciers

It’s not that I hate cats. After all, I grew up with cats. Lots of ’em. We lived on a major thoroughfare that was a drag strip to a high school, and the cats were always getting mowed over. If you put all the cats I had growing up in a blender, which would be a good idea, and poured them into a glass, the sum of them couldn’t measure up to a fraction of one of my dogs. Face it, cats are a pain in the ass, and here are just a dozen reasons not to own them.

1. The cat box. Yes I realize we have come a long way in cat box technology. We have clumping kitty litter and battery-operated “self-cleaning” cat boxes. But the bottom line is, you are still collecting cat shit and giant, clumped-up cat pee balls in your house. And I don’t think anyone will argue that cat waste doesn’t smell like the end of the world. Eventually you have to get near it, smell it up close, and figure out a way to get it out of your house. And how do cats repay you?

2. By Spraying. It is a myth that neutering your cat will put an end to random cat peeing in your house. And face it: cat pee is forever. Cats know how to maximize the length of time your house will reek of them. When I was growing up, we had a stove that had a recessed burner with a soup pot that fit down into the recessed hole. Mr. Ling, an inbred Siamese we owned when I was 7, peed on the burner while the pot was being washed. We never used that burner again, ever. Once I lived in a house where the heat registers were in the floor, and my last rat-bastard cat, Franny, peed in it, and every time the heat clicked on, a giant Glade Plug-in, Eau de Franny scent, spewed its foul stench throughout the house. Nothing—not baking soda, tomato juice, sprays, cologne, ammonia—could remove that smell. In the end, we ended up sealing up that heat duct, and that part of the house remained icy in the winter and subtropical in the summer.

3. No respect for hygiene. Cats will present themselves anywhere. They’ll walk on your kitchen counters and dining table. And we all know where those feet have been (see item #1). You want to have me over for dinner? Euthanize your cat and pressure wash your kitchen with Clorox. While we’re on the subject of cat feet, let’s talk about:

4. Claws. First of all, have you ever heard of Dog Scratch Fever? Of course not. Cats can do major damage with both front and back claws. And Cat Scratch Disease can bring on meningoencephalitis. I don’t know what that is, but it’s a lot of letters. Franny was given to me against my will by a passive-aggressive ex when we worked in Saudi Arabia. I wanted to leave him in his native cat-box-like country, but the ex insisted we fly straight back to the states, thus nullifying the one chance I had of experiencing Italy, which I blamed on the cat after the ex was dismissed. He (Franny, not the ex) loved to take pot-shots at anyone who came within arm’s length, and loved watching people bleed. In the rare moments when cats show affection, what do they do? They knead. You’ve seen that paw-packing action where they repeatedly dig their razor sharp claws into your flesh. And let’s not forget how cats use those claws to shred your furniture and drapes. You’d have thought that by now domestic cats would have evolved out of their claws. After all, they don’t need them to hunt down and capture Tender Vittles. But they keep them just to to have as their weapons of cat destruction. That’s how vindictive cats are. They totally eschew Darwinism. So if you think declawing is cruel, consider above-ankle amputation instead.

5. Disgusting table habits. Growing up, our kitchen table was bordered on two sides by an enormous vinyl booth. There was a corner platform on it that was in direct line of fire of a heating vent, where warmth attracted the cats. And of course, what better time to be in the booth corner than dinnertime, when aromas from the meat dish are easily enjoyed. Oh, and while we’re here, said Sohi and Ling, our two Siamese monsters, yes, while we are here and the whole family is here, and they are so rudely partaking of red meat and not giving us any, this would be a prime opportunity for us to kick back and lick our anuses. And let’s not stop until they’re done eating. To this day, people wonder why I’m such a fast eater. I minimized the time I had to watch that feline dinner theater. True, dogs lick their genitals, but wouldn’t you if you could? Dogs can’t reach their bee-holes with their tongues, and even if they could, they wouldn’t do it in front of you. They respect you too much for that.

6. Attitude. Cats don’t give a shit about you. They can get along fine without you. They don’t need you, and they don’t particularly like you. Dogs smile. Cats just scowl and give you that I-hate-you-so-much-I’ll-smother-your-infant-in-his-sleep look. Sure, some cats will purr and let you pet them, but sooner or later they grow sick of that, and they’ll turn on their bellies, latch onto your arm, shred you with all four paws and bite you. In cat language, this means, “I’ve had enough of your being nice to me; now piss off.”

7. Hairballs, hacked up in the booth corner at supper during intermission of the aforementioned Anus—The Musical! Not since Tuna Helper has there been a more delightful side dish.

8. Eating habits. If you attempt to feed a cat anything shy of Beluga caviar, you will get that Seriously? How pedestrian! nose-in-the-air look, and they will meow relentlessly until you hop a plane to Siberia to pick up a pound or two of expensive fish eggs. Our cats would often go on hunger strikes, prompting Mom to go to the grocery store and spend her precious bourbon money on cow kidney, which she brought home and made us cut up into angstrom-unit tidbits for the cat to feed on. Cats are finicky and they love to make you suffer. Cow kidneys are rubbery and stink and are almost impossible to chop up unless you have a chain saw. Dogs, on the other hand, are not the least bit finicky and will eat anything, including your cat’s puked-up hairball. Dogs will literally mop your kitchen floor with their tongues. That’s how grateful dogs are. Dogs make great housekeepers. Dogs give back. Cats just expect more.

9. Feline AIDS. Leave it to cats to bring a killer virus into your house. As Debbie Downer says, “It’s the number one killer of domestic cats.” If Jerry Falwell was right when he said that AIDS was God’s punishment for being gay, then FIV is God’s punishment for being a cat. If not, then why is there no Canine AIDS? Why don’t those psychotic Westboro Baptist Church vermin carry signs that read, “God Hates Cats”?

10. Estrus.  If you’ve ever witnessed a cat in heat, you have probably participated in some serious sleep deprivation. Females will yowl all night long to let the male cats in the neighborhood know they’re horny. What impolite behavior! What if humans did this? Picture some frisky woman out on the streets at 3 in the morning knocking at doors yelling, “Hey! Are there any Y chromosomes in there? Wake up, bitches, cuz I’m ready!” When dogs are in heat, you don’t hear them baying at the moon all night long. Dogs just find a way to escape the confines of the house and go out and quietly Get Them Some. Hell, they don’t even have to do that. A female dog can just kick back with a glass of good Chardonnay and quietly watch Lassie reruns while waiting for her gentlemen callers to show up at the door. Female cats are relentless in their cat-calls, and you can only shut them up by bringing in a male cat to mate with them. And then what do they do? Complain because the male cat rips them apart with their:

11. Penile Spines. From Wikipedia:  “The female will utter a loud yowl as the male pulls out of her. This is because a male cat's penis has a band of about 120–150 backwards-pointing penile spines, which are about one millitmeter long; upon withdrawal of the penis, the spines rake the walls of the female's vagina, which is a trigger for ovulation. This act also occurs to clear the vagina of other sperm in the context of a second (or more) mating, thus giving the later males a larger chance of conception.” Lovely, just adorable. Just makes me want to purr with delight. You don’t see dogs having penile spines. They just have the knot, or as they say in Latin class, the bulbus glandis, the canine cock ring, which makes both parties involved happy. They wouldn’t dream of treating their mates so rough. And human males don’t have these. The closest thing men have to penile spines is the post-coital behavior of not calling the next day or not responding to her texts. Ouch!

12. Lousy Gifts. A dog’s gift is unconditional love. Dogs bring you balls, sticks, and Frisbees to throw. They give you the gift of exercise. They put their heads in your lap when you’re sad and cry when you do, because they are tuned in to your emotions. They amuse you by running their legs when you scratch them in the right spot. Dogs hug. What gifts do cats give you? Dead animals. Let us not forget the bird innards that dear Zooey left on my pillow one morning for me to rub my face in while I slept or the bleeding, screaming rabbit he brought into the house at 2:30 one morning that I had to chase around, catch and then put out of its misery. Thanks so much, kitties. What a pleasure it’s been to have had you as companions. One of the happiest days of my life was the day I took Franny to the vet to be euthanized.  By that time in his life, he weighed 20 pounds and had drawn blood from every friend I had brought into my house. I didn’t even stay with him while the doctor gave him his shot. I just dropped him off, drove away and thought of Italy.

So, the next time you head to your local animal shelter and are intrigued by those adorable little spry kittens frolicking around, remember these twelve steps to hell and go have a look at a nice mutt. Remember: he’ll mop your floors for you, not with you.

billwiley.blogspot.com by Bill Wiley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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