WRITING

The New Ketchup Packet

2010-04-27T06:25:00.001-07:00

The Focus Group Survey That Led to the Current Packet's Creation

Why Fishing is Awesome

2009-06-23T06:53:00.000-07:00

The Allure of the Lure
Boston Globe, May 2009

It's the Economy, Cupid

2008-10-22T07:29:00.000-07:00

(A version of this originally appeared in the Weekly Dig)
Steve Macone

When the economy sours, dining out becomes a low-hanging fruit, one of the first things people forgo to save money. Frankly, I’m thrilled. This might be the best excuse not to have to go out to eat to come along in years—the greatest thing since sliced bread, which, coincidentally, is great for making sandwiches at home.

Americans spend about 49 percent of their food budget on dining out. The Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service expects that number to pass 50 percent sometime around 2012. But I've felt for a long time that dining out has occupied the position of inflated priority, that a luxury has been advertised into a norm and swallowed without question by a public that feels entitled to this vaguely Manhattan-esque lifestyle, that in reality this lifestyle more often results in the ambiguous half-dining out experiences of drive-thrus, "grabbing a burger on the way," or bringing home Chinese food, which include the costs but none of the abstract aesthetic benefits associated with eating out. Then there's the spending beyond our means, the disintegration of the domestic sphere, and the criticism of it being good old fashion laziness. If you look at how enmeshed the practice of eating out is, with the expense and typically large portions, it's clear: when it comes to our national eating habits, gratuity is included.

Whew! Pretty convincing, huh? All that is just what I've been telling people.

I actually just don’t like eating out.

I finally realized how much I don't like it when my girlfriend and I recently had a great time eating out. We went to Sushi Café in Harvard Square. Then we got ice cream at Coldstone, sharing a "Cookie-Doughn't You Want Some" in that playfully selfish way where you protect your portion. Hey quit hogging all the whipped cream! It was all very nice. Too nice.

Something was missing.

It was that subtle twinge that sometimes accompanies a dining out experience: when something goes wrong and eating out with another person reveals itself as a ridiculous three-legged race of an affair, neither person actually eating when or where or what they'd like, an expensive subcontracting of a simple bodily need in which I actually pay to submit to the tyranny of cooperation. And why does "cooperation" always mean we go to the place she wants?

But on this evening, none of that. Just a great dinner and dessert.

And then, on Waffle Cone Wednesday, it was revealed to me: the equation of dining out happily. That night, I was in "specific mode." Kate was in "I don't care mode." Two people in "specific mode," who know exactly what they want, becomes an obvious problem. I want Thai food, and I'm not even sure if anything other than Thai food is even capable of making me feel full. The idea that she doesn't want Thai food is absurd, because Thai food sounds so delicious right now and...Italian? On a Thursday? Then come veiled accusations of veiled racism.

But two people in "I don't care" mode can be just as bad. That's when you have the "Where do you feel like eating?...Oh, I don't care" conversation, which usually lasts an annoying 18 minutes and eventually becomes about convincing the other that you care the least, thus making them responsible for the decision. I really don't care. I am completely apathetic. Really. I just decided not to vote in the next election. You start throwing out suggestions, not to help, but to prove you shouldn't be in charge. "Let's go there." "That's a bus."

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I've always wondered about the mixture of anger and hunger needed to trigger cannibalism. I think the first cannibals were trying to figure out where to eat when one got frustrated and bit the other. Then he realized that, given the options, eating his companion was logically the best course of action.

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Now, the specific/don't care modes must also interact in a matrix of who wants comfort food versus who's feeling adventurous. One end of the spectrum is "Sure, I'll drink cow's blood because it's your favorite." The other end is when you just want to know exactly what you're going to eat and how long it will take. You want to have eaten five minutes ago, actually, while wearing sweat pants.

So the night of the beautiful sushi eclipse: Kate was at her most adventurous and I was in "specific mode," and so we ate sushi. And it was awesome. Then ice cream because, well, we were both in "human being mode."

I know the merits of dining out, how it has long been intimate and communal, that it revolves around something at once necessary and indulgent, laying bare both a corporal dependence and that so-very-human striving to enjoy and add garnish to everyday experience. The problem, though, is that sometimes we eat out to celebrate a special occasion and sometimes we do it so that our bodies can perform the necessary chemical reactions to keep us alive. And it's not always clear to me which one we're doing. So if two people go out to eat with different expectations one will be walking around reading posted menus and saying "this place looks cute" while the other eats berries off of bushes and makes mental notes to Google the symptoms of hypoglycemia.

This is not even to speak of the effects of snippiness.

For early courtship, dining out makes sense. It’s efficient for the number of factors it exposes: etiquette, diet, price range, tastes. But it’s all still slightly arbitrary:

Listen, Angela, I was wondering if maybe you’d like to get together Friday and wash our cars?

What? That’s so weird. Why don’t we do what everyone else does: wait until we are weakest, when our bodies are most deprived of nutrients and we’re focusing on food, then dress in our nicest clothes, purchase meals that are potentially messy and put things in our mouths so we can’t talk.

Sounds good. Then let’s get ice cream!

But for anyone else, a "Let's go out to dinner" decision is more often a barometer of both how much you can splurge financially and how much expendable moral income—the sort of capital to celebrate life—you’ve got handy. So it follows that the economy is the perfect excuse for my aversion to extravagance. Thank you, factors I don't understand. Now I can just say, Dinner? Not with the subprime housing crunch affecting micro-credit Pell grants for Fannie Mae…

Here, I brought along some low-hanging fruit to snack on.

The Complete Rules of Playing Guys

2008-10-01T06:46:00.000-07:00

The Complete Rules of Playing Guys
(Originally published in the Boston Phoenix)
Definition: A “guy” (a/k/a “action figure”) is a hand-holdable, plastic replica of a real or theoretical being derived from appearances in movies, comics, or on television.

1) Take Newton’s second law and throw it out the window. The rate of change of one guy is really equal to how powerful the guy hitting him is. (Power = how mean/ strong a guy looks multiplied by any things sent away for or extra weapons he has.)

2) The typical interaction between guys consists of taking one guy in one hand, another guy in the other hand. Something was said, maybe about the merits of free-trade, and the first guy bashes into the other, a “prbrhhrppchhhh” is uttered and the injured party is flung backwards as far as your arm can extend. That settles that.

3) In guy world, everyone can fly. Everyone. If your guy comes with a jet pack, he can fly even better. Or maybe not fly, maybe more like you can choose when gravity affects your guy, and how much. So many fights are like walking on the moon, which is convenient, because my guy has had to defend it three times this morning.

4) The arm of that couch is a cliff. Please take your jacket off my cliff.

5) Good guys vs. bad guys: I shouldn’t even have to explain this: moral ambiguity is a grown-up construct. I know he’s bad because he’s wearing darker clothes. And listen to his voice – it’s hoarse!

6) Don’t ever call this playing with dolls.

7) When hit hard enough, anything can explode. Didn’t know that pile of papers on the coffee table had explosives in it? It didn’t.

8) Anyone can interact with anyone. Why shouldn’t Bebop from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles be able to hold court with a G. I. Joe? Yes, this would all be a beautiful demonstration of the ability of children to overlook differences if, in the end, every play session didn’t involve these people from different backgrounds leg dropping each other.

9) Humming? Did you just call the sound of my turbo boosters “humming”? This brings us to sound effects: we have them. Lots of them. Ok, four of them. But they are an integral part of maintaining the authenticity of mid-air clashes between dinosaurs and Transformers. Punch = a quick “Ppfpgshhhh.” That’s universal. Ask any little boy what a punch sounds like. That’s it. Laser = a high pitch “pshewwwwww psshewwwww.” Falling = a long “ahhhhhhhhhhh” that fades away at the end and implies everyone’s last words are “ahhhhhhhh.” On hitting the ground, a guy may or may not explode, a sound that comes from both vibrations in the back of the mouth and having heard very few actual explosions. Dialogue is sparse. This is guys, not a psychological novel.

10) Seriously, never call this playing with dolls. Okay, it’s ostensibly playing with scaled-down characters. But playing guys is an activity, nay, a rite of passage, through which we develop spatial skills such as how a flame-thrower would work while you’re flying. (Answer: it can also become a jet.) And while structurally the term “playing guys” is similar to “playing house,” the latter is a game of mimicry. Let’s bake and vacuum like we see Mommy and Daddy doing. Playing guys is one of fantasy, of building a world that is not just better and cooler than our own, but one that is the actual manifestation of a set of physical laws and heroic values that we feel deeply, even at age six, is the way things should be. Let’s do 17 flips in the air like Mommy and Daddy have never done but for some reason this is how I play. In fact, this is why we like action movies: they are a life-size dramatization of playing guys. That actor jumping that house on the dirt bike and the 20-minute fight scene are not ridiculous insofar as they are merely a director playing guys, a game come true. So the “action” that precedes both “movies” and “figures” is this specific type of action, an unrealistic fulfillment of a latent schema in which physical laws bend to accommodate a massaging of the ego by way of stretching what an individual is capable of, a world enchanted by the hyper-masculine. In this sense the term “playing guys” rings with second meaning: a paraphrasing might lead to, “amusing oneself with action figures,” but “playing guys” also suggests, in a sad way, “acting like men.”

11) A guy’s fort is his castle. I say this because I’m wondering why you continue to move the cushions back to where they “belong.”

12) Number of lives every guy has: one million. Except sometimes if you’re a low-ranking bad guy I encounter on my way to the head bad guy. Then you get one. Or you are particularly susceptible to getting knocked out by one punch and placed into this ambiguous not-quite-dead state that excuses my six-year-old mind from having to contemplate the finality of death.

13) While most guys come with movable legs, it would be absurd to manipulate each leg individually for every step they take. So we’ve devised this sort of two-legged hop motion. I know, it’s not very realistic…

2008-09-18T08:07:00.001-07:00

Finding the Dreams of My Girl

By Steve Macone
(Originally appeared in the Boston Globe Magazine)

It turns out that what happens in bed can complicate relationships.

My girlfriend calls me in the morning with that playful, groggy voice: "I just had this dream . . ."

"Yeaaa?" I say with that playful, wow-this-is-actually-the-exact-moment-I-wanted-to-have-a-conversation-about-unicorns voice. I'm working in my dorm, just minutes from hers. Now I'm fearing the drop-in.

"This guy at church," she says, "he won the lottery and moved into our house. It was so weird."

"It was so weird" is a phrase both of us feel the need to repeat 17 times on average while recounting a dream to the other. "I was frying an egg and then I had to fight off the cast of That '70s Show with strips of bacon, but I made them too crispy and they broke," I'll say. "It was so weird." Of course it was weird. It was a dream.

Dreams can be difficult to discuss, even with my girlfriend of a year and a half. Sometimes I think, what's the use? Best-case scenario, I merely appear completely insane.

And what starts as harmless morning small talk may lead to a Freudian free-for-all of overanalyzing.

I hang up. She dreamed of another guy at her house?

I sip my coffee and forget about it, browsing the headlines and drifting into my normal morning thoughts. But then it's back to her dream, the description of which now rings with a potency that grows with time - like a lesson from a grandfather or a lyric from a Journey song. So she sees being with that other guy as synonymous with winning the lottery, huh? Getting out of this relationship as a stroke of luck?

Maybe she wants something. The house - she wants to move in together. The church - she's praying for a way out.

The lottery - she wants to go to Foxwoods?

Now I've learned, as I should have suspected, that you can, in fact, do things to annoy your significant other when you're not even awake. Her asking what I dreamed about is the classic "What are you thinking?" trap with a heat-seeking tip. It's "What are you thinking when you're knocked out and not able to filter your thoughts and your defenses are down . . . hmm?"

So I'll say, "You. I was dreaming of a big picture of you. There were roses all around it, and then you actually ran through the picture of you, busted right through it like you were coming out to a football game, and then we sat and talked all day about who you would be in the movie Mean Girls if it had been based on your high school. Then we danced."

Discussing dreams can be a kooky way to get to know each other on the subconscious level, something between a corny icebreaker game and a Rorschach ink-blot test. But because of the associations dreams have with our deepest, darkest thoughts, conversations about them risk appearing to recapitulate the relationship - and any insecurities about it.

"I dreamed about tacos."

You feel wrapped up? You think we're cheesy? Sometimes soft? We need to add something to spice things up? Yo quiero someone else!?

Like relationships, dreams bring us to the edge of logic. Both draw out a part of ourselves we can't see on our own. Dating, like dreaming, often becomes a streaming, fluctuating rhapsody, something that can be bliss and terror in the same evening. Some relationships are dreams from which you never want to awake. Others are, well, nightmares.

Perhaps the biggest similarity is that both dreams and relationships have been idealized into something unrealistically perfect, while we all know the two are more often bizarre, unique, and unpredictable.

So my girlfriend and I have learned not to take dream interpretation too seriously, that sometimes I simply watched That '70s Show before bed and wanted bacon for breakfast.

And whenever I hear somebody saying they are looking for someone to "share their dreams with," I always picture two people walking on a beach, at sunset, wielding overdone breakfast meats.