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Why is bruschetta always served at events where you’re meeting people for the first time? It’s like - Hey, trying to make a good impression in front of all these strangers? How about a game where you have to nonchalantly get a puck of stale bread and 45 wet cubes into your mouth in 3 clean bites? Can you also nod in agreement as some suit rambles on about data privacy? Awesome!
It’s 5 pm and you’re drunk on one glass of wine. You’ve been at a work function all day and haven’t eaten so you’re hungry like a high school Kyle after practice. This is why you’d stoop so low to eat bruschetta anyway. The thing about bruschetta is that it’s always bad. It is also impossible to eat. You bring it up to your mouth and the tomatoes just fly off, jumping ship like the shark is ON the boat. I don’t know what Mexican jumping beans are, but are we sure they aren’t the tomatoes on bruschetta? I use the word tomato generously. Bruschetta tomatoes are anemic. They look like Colin from Secret Garden. If they had bodies they’d be in bed with the curtains drawn, even during summer. Their mothers would have hooked noses, incapable of giving love as they too had been deprived by their own ruthless, witch mothers. Eating bruschetta is chaos. It is a challenge. It should have its own TV show and be hosted in Las Vegas like America Ninja Warrior.
Bruschetta is what Chili’s would serve if they did weddings. It’s frantic pizza. Why don’t they just serve pizza? We all like that better anyway. When I was 13 I thought bruschetta was health food, and eating it made me feel European. Tomatoes as a snack? God, I was exotic.
Bruschetta is the watery scapegoat here. Food at work events where you don’t know anyone should be avoided entirely. You’re meeting new people, so you’re nervous, which impacts your hand eye coordination and fine motor skills. Combine this with the fact that there’s very little consideration for the eater in the foods that they’ve chosen to serve. Eating is therefore a liability, each meatball a land mine of potential humiliation.
Sliders. The mini bun is always high and kind of lightly hard? so you really have to unhinge to make a dent. But the dent doesn’t do much because the insides (pork bbq, too sweet) are soft and slide out. Plus you have to like, bring your neck WAY down below the heads of conversation to have the balls to eat it. You’re now in the shape of an S. People are like, “What is Quasimodo doing down there??” You are too wretched to respond.
Cheese cubes. Always eat these by themselves. If you put a cheese cube on a cracker it looks ridiculous and too tall, like a skyscraper in the plains. Just impossible to eat. And why do you always have to have one swiss, one colby jack and four pepper jacks when you really only want the colby jacks? (Because if people see you loving orange cheese they’ll know you’re a child and not a businesswoman, maybe not even a woman.) Carrots and ranch. The ranch is liquid so you can never really scoop it up on the shallow plate. You end up just poking the carrot onto the ranch. There are issues with any dip. You put hummus on your plate and then 2 pita chips. It’s so difficult to scoop that you push instead to try and get under it. The ratio is always off (normally too much dip), and you’re in mid-conversation about chatbots or some bullshit just holding a plate of leftover dip like, “Everyone! Look at my dip!”
When you have a little plate with only a couple things it looks REAL DUMB. Like three grapes? Why would you choose three grapes? The little plate is always so damn light, like it’s going to float right out of your hand. Thankfully the clamminess keeps it in place. (I’ve never shaken someone’s hand with a dry hand - what’s that like?) I usually blame my wet hand on the sweating wine. Wine always sweats at these events, have you noticed? It’s nervous like you.
1 drink at work equals 3 drinks in real life. Why is that? If I have half a glass of anything while wearing a blazer, I’m ready to grind and get in fights. I’m usually so relieved to have a little something that I act inordinately happy and frighten others. I overcompensate and act super confident like I’m a dad, really tough on my twin sons but only because I love them so much. I’m so thankful I haven’t had to go to any work functions this year because I KNOW I would have brought up The Last Dance to a bunch of 50-year-old men thinking, who brought their daughter here and why is it speaking? before subsequently excluding me from the conversation while I stood there pretending I didn’t have a uterus.
Thank God for the wine but it makes eating that much more cumbersome. I always envy the octopus at these things - so many hands! They can gesticulate with one to tell an engaging story, while another nabs a bacon-wrapped date, while yet another holds a glass of wine, while the other five build Habitat homes.
Sometimes there are nuts. WHAT looks more pathetic than six almonds on a plate? And you’d think six isn’t a lot but eating six almonds is a chore. It feels like you’re chewing wood; you are a beaver. The nuts are the things you will eat first off your plate because they look the easiest. Don’t be fooled. I’ve once gotten too much hand on one almond and had to push it through my lips, using my other fingers as backup because I was too clumsy trying to act human to do a cute pop-in movement. So it looked like I was momentarily just tasting all 5 finger tips at once. It’s sad because I’m actually good at meeting new people. I guess even Michael Jordan missed baskets.
Sometimes things are served on skewers. You can’t pull chicken satay off with your teeth or your hands because that would be rude so you have to jam it off with a plastic fork which is especially difficult because the chicken is baked right on there and heavier than the cheap plastic. If you apply enough pressure, it does come off. Boy does it. It launches. Once my chicken piece hit a man’s pant leg. He pretended not to notice, and I felt a shame that Eve in the garden couldn’t rival.
The dessert is always a cute take on something. Like mini s’mores or cheesecake bites. Something you’d serve at a tea party for American Girl dolls. These are usually pretty delicious, though they’re spoiled by seeing all the blowhard businessmen act like little Samanthas. Seeing Chris, a 45-year-old dad of two, dunk a mini churro into a little cup of chocolate sauce is really, really sad. I feel for men in these moments. Women eating sweets is always allowed, even celebrated (see: all commercials).
Oftentimes there are little candies at the tables. They are individually wrapped which makes them noisy so you don’t want to eat them. You also don’t want to eat them because they just taste like dye. The tables themselves are too small. It feels like you’re at one of those dollhouse tables they put on your pizza at Papa John’s.
And the serving utensils. They are always so big and plastic. You use the greasy shovel to try and scoop up a few cherry tomatoes but they’re sliding all around in their oils playing hard to get. You don’t even want them. You are just pretending, because they add color and make you look healthy. Do the 2 gin and tonics you’ve slammed have the same effect? Hm.
The cocktail napkins are always so dry and keep their shape. And what are you supposed to do with them? Under the plate? Between your fingers? None at all? Once, a server walked by with a tray of croquettes. I helped myself to one, at which point she produced a napkin. I didn’t know what to do. One hand had a fried ball in it, the other a glass of wine. She held my stare, provoking me. I reached out with my ring and pinky fingers and grasped at it, regretting that I’d lured her out of those double swinging doors in the first place. I was after all, starving.
Whenever I ask a fellow attendee, “So, have you been to this event in the past?” What I really mean is, “So, do you want us both to stop talking?” I’ve never been more grateful for the bladder than when I’m at a work event trying to get out of a conversation. The hotel bathroom here is mecca. It is the land of milk and honey. It is quiet, it is solitary, it is enlightenment. If it is a W, and God I hope it is, it is bathed in soft, purple light. It’s what Virginia Woolf envisioned when she wrote A Room of One’s Own. It’s where I can finally breathe, rest my painful smile, and text my boyfriend, “I hate this. What are you doing?” I savor these moments in the stall where I can pull down my pants and scroll with abandon. And even though it’s a brief respite, and I’ve nearly peed on the novel-sized registration badge dangling into the bowl, I know that soon, soon, I’ll go to my hotel room, order room service, and ravage a turkey club in the bed sheets like the real businesswoman I am.
So many lols! And the Secret Garden reference!!!!!!!!