But if you’re all eating at the restaurant, everyone can take as much ketchup as they want from those big soap dispensers that never aim exactly into the little cups. Maybe they can get the big drink refill cups and fill those with ketchup.
Because that’s another benefit to eating at home – you don’t have to shell out for drinks. Why are they selling these drinks for movie theater prices? Are they trying to make up for losing money on ketchup?
Or maybe the drink charge pays for the freebies that you get when you eat at the restaurant – the bread, the chips and salsa, and the salty cauliflower that you can swear is the same piece of cauliflower they put out the last time you were there. And the crayons. These aren’t things you get when you eat at home.
On the other hand, if you eat at home, you can share whatever dishes you want without it being weird. You don’t know what’s good, so everyone orders something different, and everyone has a little of everything. That’s the whole fun of eating out, right? So why do I get the feeling we’re the only ones in the restaurant saying, “Yeah, we’ll have one soup, but can you also bring sixteen clean bowls?” Though I guess for the amount of soup each of us tastes, we can just use those little paper bowls near the ketchup dispenser.
But on the other hand, if you eat at home, you have to clean up. Sure, it’s only polite to throw out your stuff in a restaurant, but you’re not expected to wipe all that extra ketchup off the table, or mop underneath your kid because he can’t eat rice without dropping 95% of it on the floor.
But on the other hand, kids don’t always behave in restaurants. They keep getting up and getting in the way of waiters who are walking around trying to balance hot soup and sixteen clean bowls. Sure, they don’t stay seated at home either – they keep getting up to play in the living room. But in a restaurant, there is no living room. Just a dining room, a kitchen, and an entrance area. So they play in the bathroom.
Dear Mordechai,
My friend just had a kid. What should I get as a baby present?
M.S.S
Dear M.,
Get them a little outfit, so people could go, “Oh! How cute!” in case the baby itself isn’t cute.
Outfits are a very popular baby gift, because babies tend to burn through outfits like crazy. (This is why everyone’s always asking how big the baby is. How polite is that? But it’s fine if you’re measuring him for a suit.) Babies also keep going up in size, never going back down. It’s not like adults, who can wear the same pair of socks until it dissolves. Babies change size every month. And they throw up a lot. They’re also like little teenagers – always moody, and they’re up all night.
But whatever outfit you get, make sure it has snaps. That way, the parents can open it up when the baby is really filthy without having to cut him out of the outfit. Snap outfits save lots of time opening them that is then made up by the amount of time it takes to close them. The manufacturers stick hundreds of snaps on there, coming down from the top of the outfit and then branching in several different directions, and not every snap even has a matching piece, and the baby does not at all care if you get some of the snaps wrong, and you have to figure it all out on a squirming baby in the dark in a rush.