(51 weeks)
TUESDAY.
I’m out for dinner with Marie-Claude, and after the waiter takes our order she stares at me appraisingly.
“A spinach salad?” she asks. “With cranberries and goat cheese?”
“I like spinach,” I say, suddenly ashamed.
“I don’t get you. Whatever happened to the Jonathan Goldstein who never felt a meal was complete without French fries?”
“He died of a heart attack at thirty-two.”
The thing about having childhood friends is that they see any changes in your behaviour since the age of eleven as a betrayal of your basic personality. If you’re not collecting hockey cards with a face covered in chocolate, you’re a pretentious ass.
As a compromise, I consider eating the salad with my hands when it arrives.
WEDNESDAY.
I’m on my way to Waterloo, Ontario, to deliver a keynote address, and while waiting for the plane to board, I have a sandwich and beer at the airport bar. The tab comes to nearly seventeen dollars. After paying it, I look at the bill.
While I’m irked that the bartender has bundled a service fee into the total, I’m galled that the additional tip I just paid him was calculated based on that total—a total that included a gratuity I’d been unwittingly bilked out of.
Just as I’m about to say something—or, rather, just as I’m about to consider saying something—the bartender approaches me with a large jar of olives.
“I’ve been trying to open it all evening,” he says, his face red with exertion. “Would you mind trying?”
His request catches me off guard. In an instant I go from feeling angry to feeling needed. I attack the jar with the kind of ferocious determination that involves grunting, grimacing, and almost herniating my disc. For some inexplicable reason, I want nothing more than to prove myself to a complete stranger who, only moments earlier, ripped me off.
After about a minute, the lid pops open. I’m covered in sweat and olive juice. The bartender thanks me and then, for a job well done, hands me a plastic shot glass full of olives.
As I walk away eating olives and feeling grateful, it strikes me that the bartender’s gesture could very easily be employed in other ticklish social situations. Newspaper vendor treating you brusquely? Office manager doesn’t say hello in the elevator? Friend thinks your choice of healthy appetizer makes you seem too high and mighty? Just pull a jar of olives out and ask for help. Call it “extending the olive jar.”
FRIDAY.
Flying back to Montreal after my talk, I grab some air sickness bags to use for packing work lunches. Not only will looking at them work as a natural appetite suppressant, but they might also discourage anyone from stealing my lunch from the refrigerator.