Lunch Matters

I’m writing this at 1:57 on July 1, 2010, but because I meant to write it yesterday—in order to bump my number of posts for June up to a whopping pair—I’ve backdated it to June 31, a day that never happened. Any migraines you may be experiencing are likely the result of temporal confusion, a.k.a. time madness. Deal with it accordingly.

[Bother. The evil computer wouldn't let me date it to then, for fear of melting.]

I’ve been experiencing my own brand of time madness in the last week or so. The great coup of April was extracting from The Pink Newspaper a promise to pay me enough money each month to kind-of-sort-of cover my expenses. The triumph of May was carrying out said work, and the glory of this June was reaping the benefits in the form of two unfortunately-not-pink paychecks. Because it doesn’t take that long to open envelopes and deposit monies, and because I’m still indulging my recently graduated self with a license to waste a bit of time, I spent most of June on my sofa, watching some sort of international sporting event and tickling the newly adopted cat of my roommates. The soccer has treated me all right, but the cat and I have become great friends. She likes me because I don’t judge.

For the first 3/4s of the month, my inactivity was broken up regularly by fits of effort. For the last week this has not been the case. Apparently it only takes a couple of days to make me go a bit potty. To wit:

I spent over an hour Tuesday fiddling with a bottle.

Now, that is not something that a man pops out of bed in the morning dead set on achieving. No one, eyes seared by the fiery glow of 11 o’clock, ears rattled by the persistent chatter of jackhammers, ever greets the day be declaring, “Today I’ll piss away an hour fiddling with a bottle.” It’s just not something one sets out to do.

But that doesn’t mean one can’t get trapped in it. You see, I had this bottle. A 200 ml bottle that once held absinthe, long since emptied but saved for its loveliness. Near opaque, the sort of dark brown glass one associates with a 1920s pharmacist, I held on to it for a year or two, always intending to one day scrub off the label and use it to hold simple syrup. A bottle of liquor retired as an elegant container of mixer. It seemed appropriate.

After 25 minutes’ grueling elbow grease, the bottle was label and glue free. It was a few minutes’ work to prepare the mint simple syrup that was to fill it, and then I popped it—piping hot from the boiling goo inside—into the fridge to cool. Soon there would be juleps! Or there would have been, had the entire experiment not gone brutally awry.

Simple syrup is, as the name would suggest, not hard to make. There are two steps:

1. Put the ingredients (sugar, water, mint) in a saucepan
2. Boil

Somewhere around step 2, something terrible happened, and the syrup got too thick. As it cooled to room temperature, it turned as hard as puce, and the bottle was made useless.

That’s when I started to fiddle. I filled the bottle with boiling water, hoping to loosen the packed sugar, and got some out. A tiny amount. A teeny, weeny amount. I put it in a mason jar, filled that with water, and let it soak up the heat. I repeated these two steps for an hour, pausing occasionally to stab at the sugar with the pointiest implement handy: a meat skewer. It was quickly blunted.

After too long wasted on this idiotic project, I had got the level of sugar-mass down to half an inch. I was preparing another assault when my ever sensible, highly employed roommate placed his hand on my arm and said, “Will. You need to get a job.”

My eyes went wide as I realized how right he was, save for one detail. I already have a job. I just need to work harder.

I let the bottle soak overnight, but the half inch of sugar is still packed in there. I’m going to use it anyway. What harm could it do?