A Girl...

The Cheese Stands Alone

According to the FedEx website, my camera is on a truck and ready for delivery today! And I presume it will also arrive in glorious working order and never ever scare me like that again (damn well better behave itself for what I paid to have it fixed). To celebrate, as soon as it arrives I will take a picture of the fourth ring of hell that is my current work environment, specifically the hunks and chunks of duct work that are currently being stored in front of our still-out-of-order-after-two-weeks-are-you-kidding-me elevator.

This duct work is apparently for an HVAC system, which will be nice and all considering the building's existing heat is eighty years old and farschimmelt and the temperature is either freezing--in which case everyone turns on space heaters and fuses are blown and computers are crashed--or face-meltingly hot--in which case everyone opens up the newly installed windows, which, due to some infelicity of construction, react to any amount of air flow by whistling like a 500-pound canary--but that doesn't mean I won't complain the whole way through it because BY JOVE I WILL.

Firstly, the window whistling is not in tune with the nearby construction noise that is the wall over my office door being sawed clear through by a man on a ladder (a situation that effectively traps me inside my office until he (a) decides to take a snack break or (b) is overcome by asbestos and lead dust and has to take a few minutes with the lung brush).

Secondly, one of the women's toilets hasn't worked in six months and I'm beyond sick of making the frenzied trek back to the restrooms when my bladder has reached critical mass only to discover that the one remaining toilet is occupied. Sometimes I do this several times in a row. Sometimes I contemplate whether urine might actually help perk my office plants.

Thirdly, we haven't had a shipment from our bottled water company in a week because short of an Acme pulley system there's no way to get the jugs up the many, many, many flights of stairs to our office. On the bright side, that means fewer dramatic dashes to the bathroom, but on the other hand it means I'm filling up with whatever's in the community fridge that doesn't have a name on it, which, considering I don't like beer, means can after can of sugary sody pop.

Fourthly, speaking of carrying heavy things up and down the stairs, have I mentioned before that I work at a publishing house and that most of our incoming and outgoing mail is boxes of books? The boss just chuckles and calls it our new health plan.

And speaking of health plans, I need to talk to you about cheese. On Tuesday night Simon and I had dinner with his second cousin and her husband and their (brilliant, squishable) kids (aged seven months and "three and three-quarters"). In the center of the table was some sort of hot plate thing that made me think a guy in a chef's toque would be joining us to make steaming volcanoes out of sliced onions and then throw an egg into the air and catch it with his hat, but alas no. What we had instead was a raclette plate, which, as I was soon to find out, is pretty much the germophobe's answer to fondue. I don't think I've ever even had fondue, but whereas I can chalk up the first twenty years of that to lack of opportunity, I know that the eight years of avoidance thereafter has to do with a story one of my friends used to tell about our study abroad in Switzerland that features one host mom and one giant cold sore and many counts of double-dipping.

Anyway, the deal with raclette is that you melt your own cheese in your own individual tray and then you pour it out onto a piece of bread piled with bacon or red onion or potato or bell pepper that you had in the meantime grilled on the top level of the raclette dish. Had I not been in polite company, I might have braved third-degree esophagal burns and poured the cheese directly down my throat, but you know me: always trying to impress.

Although I managed to avoid the cheese-to-mouth faux pas, I'm sad to say I failed my social graces test on two other accounts.

(1) The first course was salad, and when I went to pick up a utensil, I found both a metal fork and a plastic one. Now, I can handle most salad/dinner/dessert/cocktail/seafood fork dilemmas, but when the table is set by a preschooler and the utensils are not just different sizes but different materials, I'm a little less sure of myself. I tried waiting to see what fork my hosts picked up for their salads, but they were still busy bringing food to the table and Simon was busy evaluating a Disney princess sticker book and everyone urged me to just go ahead and get started already, and so I did. I picked the plastic fork because it seemed less formal and more...salady? Of course, then everyone else used their metal forks for the salad because of course the plastic forks were less likely to scratch the nonstick surface of the raclette equipment. I might have comforted myself in the thought that I was the only one who noticed, but then the host made sure to bring me a second plastic fork before we started the cheese course. Boo.

(2) The child who declared herself to be three and three-quarters also declared herself to want to drink what I was drinking and to want to sit by me but on a very high and very tippy barstool so that we could see eye to eye as we discussed the news of the day. At one point the child tipped a little too far on her barstool, and on her way to the floor butt-first, she grabbed for the edge of the table and instead hit the tray of cheese slices. I saw her tip and I saw her fall, but I also saw--and this in slow motion--the danger befalling my slices of smooth, creamy cheese, and so, in a moment of bad judgment, instead of lunging for the small precious human, I lunged for the Gruyère. I saved the cheese, not the child. I wonder if I'll be invited back.