A Renewed Effort!

As the days wear on, my career prospects get bleaker and bleaker. Or perhaps just further off course...publishing is going under and nobody need's a new writer, so I will recommit myself to this blog because being a bank teller only exercises half of my brain.

It exercises the half that is horribly under developed. Calculating and cash handling all day has literally given me head pains. The deep recesses of my cerebellum are throbbing in ways previously unknown to me.

I'm trying to think of it like exercising. The more times you get on that treadmill or lift that iron, the easier it will become and the less you'll feel like a cripple the next day. If I keep exercising my math head, my math head will get stronger and be able to run farther.

So, uhh...right right right. I'm going to do this thing more. Do it a lot more. I've been many places since my last post and I want to rip them apart and/or give them flowers. I'll make a list to remind myself:


*Big City: Brighton Ave., Allson
An alternative to the 80 minute wait you face at Sunset Tap on a Saturday Night. Less food, less beer, but more tables and toilets. What more can a gal ask for?
*Sanctuary: State St., Boston
I am by no means a nightclub person. Is that even the right term? Clubs. Hip joint. Hot Spot. Hot steamy room that charges you $5 to walk in the door, $3 to hang up your coat and $7 for a sip of vodka tonic. Maybe I started my foray into the land of the nightclubcrawlers at the wrong place. Maybe conceptual clubs aren't my thing. Three floors, the bottom is "hell" and the top is "heaven". All I know is that after walking from Beacon Hill to Sanctuary in a new pair of patent brown t-strap heels (meow), stomping down a flight of stairs to hang my coat in hell and then the two story ascent to heaven was painful enough to challenge one of Dante's circles. My blisters be damned.
*6B Lounge: Beacon St., Boston
Adjacent to Emmet's Pub, this place was just...blah. Dark and moody interior with some really excellent seating options in the windows jutting out onto the street, but the service was terrible and the food is your basic pub fare with a Beacon Hill price tag. Will any member of my 20 person party return? Not likely. We reserved a large table to fit our swollen crowd only to find upon arrival that the doorman had given it to another 20 member party who he mistook for ours. We were too hungry and determined to get drunk to bother finding another place that could fit us, so we parked it on their comfortable leather lounge seats and helped ourselves to a bounty of $5 drafts (none of which were comped despite the lounge's inconvenient faux pas, and the host's subsequent rudeness).

Tomorrow after my shift at the mine I'm going to Harvard with my brother to hear a lecture by Jonah Lehrer, author of Proust Was a Neuroscientist and How We Decide. Aside from wanting to skip down the halls of Harvard and pretend I'm a serious intellectual for a few hours, I have a secret motive for attending this lecture. Here are some hints:

Science
Poetry
Dr. Zhivago
Replacing a book of poems entitled "Lara" for the more appropriate title of "Sarah" ("r" is meant to be rolled and the first syllable grossly elongated. Think "saaaaaarrrraah")



To bed!

The L.o.C. Gastro Diaries: The Met Bar & Grill

So when I started this thing (around last week...) I decided that it may be beneficial to comment on not only what I'm reading, watching, smelling or stealing, but also what I'm eating and drinking. Because I am in the mood and still too full to move and do something productive, I will today write about The Met Bar & Grill, specifically the one in Natick, MA. Yes, the one in the abominable Natick Mall Collection (hisssssss).

To celebrate our last day of temping together at our temp-of-the-month position, my co-worker and I decided to celebrate with tall drafts of bubbly brew and red meat. Yes, it was a true ladies night out.

I'm going to keep this simple: it was satisfying. No...it was saaaatisfying. The kind of satisfying that is so satisfying that you have no choice but to roll off of your bar stool at the meals end and make the slow march back to your car in a gastronomic stupor. The fact that one must also navigate through a mildly frightening and mostly-hidden secret hallway that winds behind all of the hip new stores to get into the faraway parking lot you left your silly little red Civic in to escape makes the experience a bit less satisfying, but that is no one's fault but my own. Or possible my co-worker's fault because it was she who demanded we park near the new American Girl Store. Oh, folly!

That was meant to be simple. NOW I'll get simple.

This is what we ate:



A $5 appetizer of Onion Strings and Fries, served in the very basket it was fried in. Service!

This friend and I don't typically enjoy onion rings, but these are strings and therefore very agreable to a ladies palate. We ate more than was attractive. We looked like a couple of moose in a cranberry bog...

That analogy doesn't work at all, but I liked the mental image. Munching moose in a cranberry bog is a MUCH more attractive image than us eating at the Met.

Way off topic. That's just evidence of how good these vittles were. I'm still in a complete stupor.

And, the burger.

I guess Phantom Gourmet RAVES about these burgers, but they like everything and I've never met a phantom I trusted. But they were right, these burgers are boss.

I got the L.A. Burger as an homage to the L.A. trip I have been meaning to make for a while, but keeps getting postponed indefinitely.

It had sprouts, avocado, and sesame seeds. So L.A. Right?

I made a god-awful mess of this. When the bartender brought me a take-home pouch, I refused to let him see the remains because I was so embarassed at what I had done. I did give him a great tip though because he was a water phantom. He literally refilled my water glass twice without me even realizing what had happened. Another testament to the beauty that was this meal.

This was a bit long-winded. Stupor is slowly guiding me towards sleep...slowly...