I had a lovely time in Joshua Tree, really I did, and I’ll get to that later. Alas, my current preoccupation is everyone’s favorite vacation souvenir, food poisoning. This is obviously high on the list of banned subjects for blogs, but three days of applesauce and The Mindy Project (…) has allowed me a lot of time to reflect on what it is I’m being punished for—and that, in further penance, I will share. The short-list so far:
- Spending Thanksgiving with strangers (well, friends I hadn’t met yet) instead of my family, who are located literally eight hours closer to me than the desert is.
- My dismissive attitude toward people with restrictive diets, often manifested in such savage, Epipen-elitist questions as, “Like, just stomachache allergic or actually allergic?”
- Consuming meat products prepared by a chef previously occupied in serving the mangled carcass of a quail to his red-tailed hawk, a “bitch of a bird” (only I found this moniker funny) who chirped happily while pecking bits of heart off of her handler’s glove and wearing, like him and me and everyone else, a glow-stick necklace.supplied by a PhD candidate studying air pollution. “I don’t like the way it’s looking at me,” said the scientist of the raptor, which was fair, so we swapped seats and I got to watch the campfire flicker in the bird’s eyes and recite Lord Alfred Tennyson under my breath like the happiest nerd on Earth. Seriously. Screw Burning Man.
The point is: I swear to the Great Chief of all weekend warriors that I will never do any of these things again if you will just forgive me and let me out of bed, on my bike, and to the nearest cheeseburger. After that I could rewrite this recap to focus on the good stuff—and really, there was plenty.
e.alia.salim 