Convenience can make things harder
Originally published in May 2005, The Daily Sentinel, Grand Junction, Colo.
Maybe they’d known each other since high school, which they might have finished all of five years ago. Maybe they’d only met recently and found a lot in common. Whatever, now they were friends.
These two women, they were pretty and healthy, talking happily as they walked. Both punctuated sentences with gestures they made with one han
When they were girls, these women, they’d been popular. Parties, restaurants, dates – they had options anytime they wanted to go out. But now they were parents and had responsibilities, so they’d come to view the restaurant – with its indoor plastic playground – as a place of leisure.
For less than 10 precious dollars apiece, they could feed themselves and the little ones, then release the kids into the giant Habitrail hamster cage. In that play area, the kids might spend an hour bouncing off each other while their mommies sat and enjoyed some nearly uninterrupted, sympathetic adult company.
I saw these two young women and their two little children through the windshield of my pickup while navigating the restaurant’s drive-through. All I really witnessed was the four of them walking across the parking lot, so I can’t be sure the play area was truly their destination. However, I’ve seen enough parents headed that way to bet it was. I’ve even been there with my own daughter a handful of times.
Seeing the freedom such franchises had come to represent for those two helped me recognize the shackles we can shape for ourselves over time with those same fast-food chains.
Convenience became a problem for me some years back. During the most “convenient” periods of my life, I’d go out of my way to pick up fast food two, three, even four or five times a week. I went so often that I developed strategies to quickly score my bags of food and that 32-ounce tanker of soda (filled with sugar, one of the most addictive white powders). I learned the best time to head to the joints, early enough to beat the high-schoolers rushing to get their own noon-hour fixes but still late enough to legitimately call the meal “lunch.”
I don’t want fast food because I enjoy the restaurant “experience,” and in fact I avoid going inside. I’m a drive-through veteran, with well-considered opinions about the best possible menu arrangement (there should be two, one where you place your order and another about 20 feet farther down the line so you can figure out what you want while you’re waiting) and proper etiquette (people who don’t have the cash out of their pocket and ready to hand it over immediately at the window, thus delaying the line by as much as half a minute, are unspeakably self-absorbed).
It’s a defeat for me if the drive-through line is so long when I arrive that it would actually be faster to park and walk inside to order. In fact, I’m likely to head somewhere else rather than go to those extremes.
Once I’ve scored my meal, I often eat while I travel so I can hide my habit from the world. Sometimes it’s hard to find a free fist to shake at the idiots driving while holding cell phones at their ears.
I don’t know exactly when I started jonesing for an over-the-counter burrito when a quick sandwich from home should be enough, but it’s time for a change. Last year I resolved to limit myself to one soda a day – instead of the three or four I was used to – and dropped about 20 pounds without much noticing. I could stand to lose 30 or 40 more, and might go a good way toward that by cutting out the remaining cola and most of the fast food … which, really, doesn’t even taste all that good.
So why does writing about it make my mouth water?