Lunch Provided

Today, I was the victim of informational social influence. It was noon, and I had just concluded a rather embarrassing swim class in which I had attempted to swim the butterfly stroke.* Naturally, I was feeling quite a bit peckish as I climbed four flights of stairs to attend a talk on what I believed would have something to do with linguistic anthropology, but which instead was primarily a biography of an Indonesian writer--anyway, I was hungry, and there was supposed to be lunch at this lecture. But, just as I entered the room, the lecture began; and unaware that the pizza boxes containing the provided lunch were situated not by the available seating, but next to the professor giving the lecture, I headed over to sit down near my linguistic compatriots, _____ and _____ , so that I could quickly snag some lunch and make myself not a violin case- and backpack-toting nuisance.

Having seated myself, I spotted the pizza in its far-too-prominent position near the talking professor. I realized immediately that I had made a fatal mistake. The rest of the audience had already gotten pizza and cans of a popular cola, the latter which struck me as an odd choice for anthropologists, but I digress, as I like to do, because digressions are how we learn interesting facts. Anyway, pizzaless and sodaless, I hoped that someone would eventually get up and replenish his or her plate while the professor spoke, thus freeing me from my discomfort-inducing need to conform. No one did.

As a victim of informational social influence, I became a victim of hunger, too. I resigned myself to a state of pizzaless lecture, but in my prospective memory I preserved an image of myself 45 minutes in the future, when, I believed, I would be able to grab some pizza on the way to my work shift. Alas, when the shining moment of the lecture's end arrived, and I finally confronted the pizza box-laden table, I was dismayed to find that the only remaining pizza was pepperoni pizza. And I don't eat metazoans.

I learned a few good lessons today:
1) Your hips will sink if you extend your head too far out of the water while breathing during the butterfly.
2) Even when lunch is "provided," you should make a contingency plan for dejeuning.** Hunger is not a pleasant experience.
3) I am privileged. Before today, I have never had to skip lunch.
4) Dessert is a meal best served four times.


*Why that stroke involves legs I will never know. Butterflies only have wings.
**The act of lunching is an important enough concept to merit a synonym.