posted by Allison
For Beck and I tonight, the third of these twenty-eight tables was dinner out. We were out, and in the car, at about 6:30 tonight, and Beck asked if I just wanted to grab something out for dinner, and my initial reaction was, Meh. We’ve already got plans for dinner tomorrow evening, and we should eat at home more often anyway, and I can eat something simple like spaghetti or something and it’ll be no biggie. But then I re-thought about eating out under the auspices afforded us by this 28 Tables thing, and then was like, Oh totally let’s go get some thai food at that place with the awesome coconut cake.
My hesitation at enjoying this third table at home was, I think, very much related to how we’re not just parking it in front of the television set this month—and that’s part of what “simple” entails for me. Grab a bite and zone out to some Simpsons or Golden Girls, and when a goodly sized chunk of time (20 minutes or so) is up you’ll know by the rolling of the credits. Then you can move on to something more productive so you don’t feel like a total lazybones till you have to go to work the next day. Having written that out just now, it amazes me how many of our evenings have been spent just about like that: dinner with tv and then something else. I think that one of my goals for Twenty-eight Tables is rapidly assuming a vague, obtuse stature in wanting, very generally, to expand the horizons of my comfort zone: try new things, get better at some of them, make it a point to do some things that I don’t get around to doing often enough. We’re only a few days into this February Experimonth, but I’ve so far stuck very close to my pre-existing comfort zone in having a fancy sit-down dinner with good long conversation, having hot dogs*, and tonight going out for dinner. I hope in the following weeks I break outta the zone a little more and enjoy some new experiences!
*if you have ever talked with Beck about hot dogs, you will know that we’ve had them for dinner approximately 219 times since we’ve known each other. It’s a pretty standard dinnertime procedure.
3 Comments
February 4, 2009 at 11:58 am
For the record: We both had coconut soup and coconut cake. I had the chicken masaman curry and you had the spicy basil tofu. Water to drink.
February 4, 2009 at 12:32 pm
I hear you, on expanding comfort zones. M&I get into patterns, too, and we talk about ways to shock ourselves out of those patterns and do new things, or even old things we want to do but just don’t, because it’s not on the usual evening agenda.
February 6, 2009 at 3:12 pm
That coconut cake is amazing.