An (Emily) Post
Today I chose to lunch alone.
A much needed hour to do my much needed class reading.
However, I forgot what a consuming occupation eating really is.
My books don’t always cooperate, requiring one hand to hold down the pages – leaving the other to bear all the work involved with eating. This, combined with my voracious appetite – causes me to leave with one big problem.
Or, rather, multiple small problems.
Stains.
On whatever is covering my mid to upper thigh area.
I munched on my beets while reading about what Langston Hughes thought of jazz. Little did Langston know that I had more important things to worry about – dodging the purple juice begging to color my relatively clean ensemble.
I briefly thought about using a paper napkin to cover my legs. But I didn’t. Which struck me as odd.
Whenever I go to a restaurant with cloth napkins, I put them in my lap. Duh, so do you. So does everyone. That’s why we do it.
We certainly don’t do it out of necessity. Restaurants with cloth napkins are classy joints. I don’t read while I eat, and my meal is generally consumed in a calm, slow fashion. Therefore, the napkin is unnecessary because nothing lands in my lap.
However, in a setting where my hands and mind are otherwise occupied, manners are thrown to the wind while food debris are thrown on to my unguarded pants.
After reflecting for a bit, I realized only when given a cloth napkin do I guard my lap.
Unfortunately Langston is not a connoisseur of manners, and though I eventually did finish the reading in my new purple polka dotted pants, no light has been shed on this topic.
And so I must ask … are cloth napkins used exclusively as lap guards because of the material or the social contexts in which we find them?
A much needed hour to do my much needed class reading.
However, I forgot what a consuming occupation eating really is.
My books don’t always cooperate, requiring one hand to hold down the pages – leaving the other to bear all the work involved with eating. This, combined with my voracious appetite – causes me to leave with one big problem.
Or, rather, multiple small problems.
Stains.
On whatever is covering my mid to upper thigh area.
I munched on my beets while reading about what Langston Hughes thought of jazz. Little did Langston know that I had more important things to worry about – dodging the purple juice begging to color my relatively clean ensemble.
I briefly thought about using a paper napkin to cover my legs. But I didn’t. Which struck me as odd.
Whenever I go to a restaurant with cloth napkins, I put them in my lap. Duh, so do you. So does everyone. That’s why we do it.
We certainly don’t do it out of necessity. Restaurants with cloth napkins are classy joints. I don’t read while I eat, and my meal is generally consumed in a calm, slow fashion. Therefore, the napkin is unnecessary because nothing lands in my lap.
However, in a setting where my hands and mind are otherwise occupied, manners are thrown to the wind while food debris are thrown on to my unguarded pants.
After reflecting for a bit, I realized only when given a cloth napkin do I guard my lap.
Unfortunately Langston is not a connoisseur of manners, and though I eventually did finish the reading in my new purple polka dotted pants, no light has been shed on this topic.
And so I must ask … are cloth napkins used exclusively as lap guards because of the material or the social contexts in which we find them?
posted by judyprays at 3:23 PM
2 Comments:
mine are usually slide off and end up on the ground. I don't think that really helps though.
I think that, because cloth napkins are thicker and more absorbent of stains, they probably actually work to soak up purple juices. Consider this: even if you had put a paper napkin in your lap, the juice would simply have soaked through the thin material, still leaving you stained, if a little less so.
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