She met another blind kid at a fancy dress...

Cooking. For 20-somethings in New York, it is all the rage. Men don aprons in the same thoughtless manner that a child might wear a baseball cap. Fanciful dishes with exotic ingredients grace the tables of precocious couples, who eat gingerly while sipping an appropriate wine. They share secret smiles across a scratched wooden table, bound romantically, they imagine, by intricate culinary concoctions. Regional magazines adorn their covers with comprehensive, arbitrary lists of acceptable eateries. Recipe books are no longer perused solely by spiritless stay-at-homes in an effort to forestall alcoholism. Even unaffiliated publications, with reputations to protect, cede precious pages to sonorous descriptions of aroma and taste- designed, one thinks, to stimulate arousal. Yea, the very fabric of existence is infiltrated with foreign spices and additives, and the simplicity we have known falters, obscured by the steam from overactive kitchens.

I am not a fellow much seduced by food. Though I consume my share, I am contented, even pleased, by three slices of deli turkey on white bread, slathered with excessive yellow mustard. Or pasta, cooked for eight minutes in a boiling pot, topped by store-bought marinara with an Italian name, yet manufactured in Delaware. Even omelets, more in the shape of a tortilla, filled with packaged swiss cheese and buffalo sausage. Oh, and let us not forget plain cereal, bobbing in a sea of two percent milk. These are the mainstays of my diet.

Friday evening, I dined with a friend at a restaurant called "Planet Thai." Here, I ordered a spicy tuna sushi roll. I successfully mixed a potion of soy sauce and wasabi in the tiny stoneware platter provided, and found the combined flavor pleasing. As an appetizer, it quite sufficed, and I felt content at my foray into prandial extravagance.

For the entree, I risked attempting the infamous 'Pad Thai' dish, perpetually vaunted by peers who fancy themselves gastronomes. Following the raging success of the Spicy Tuna rolls, I had high hopes indeed, and was crushed to discover that the putrid meal was an ill-fated combination of sauteed onions topped by a runny mixture of peanut butter and toilet water. I stormed out in a huff, leaving my friend to pay the bill. I doubt very much if I shall ever frequent that establishment again, and the insipid company of my gaping mate will not be in anything like high demand.

Today, having neglected to visit the grocers on Sunday, I fell back to the old standby of sweet and sour pork from a Vietnamese establishment on Third Avenue. It is one of the few Celestial plates to be trusted; the residuum is a boggy pastiche of stringy flora gathered by children in oriental swamps and tangled into quart-sized blocks by undiscriminating farm-hands whose own sense of taste has been annihilated by a lifetime's exposure to Agent Orange.

I found it adequate.