"Food is Life, the Rest is Parsley"

I am coming at this blog from a completely different angle today. I find that as cynical as I am, my mind is occasionally occupied with the thought of love/a relationship/romantic bliss - will I ever find it? Does it exist? Does its existence hinge merely on its presence or its absence in one's life? Will my life change in some sort of fundamental way if I meet someone who makes my cynicism an exercise in futility rather than a constant, albeit adorable, part of my personality?

I decided (solely with the goal of torturing myself) to count the number of men/boys who have rejected me over the course of the last year...::cringes at the thought that I am about to admit this to you:: but the lucky number is...ELEVEN. Eleven men have decided that I was not worth getting to know (some after date #1, others after date #3). The "old me" would take this as a reflection of some kind of fatal character flaw. However, after being rejected by a man every 30 days or so, I have decided that that's not what it is; and I also don't care to know what caused these men to reject me. I could say the clichéd "it just wasn't the right time", "they're not the one", yadda yadda...but I don't believe that so therefore, posing either one of those as a reason would be ridiculous and quite frankly, out of character.

Even with all of this, I learned one very important lesson last night - "Food is life, the rest is parsley." That quote is care of Alan Richman, a food critic for GQ Magazine, and I'm also currently reading his collection of articles, Fork it Over.

Last night, I visited Eataly in Manhattan - a culinary Mecca that is the brainchild of Lidia Bastianich, her son Joe Bastianich, and Mario Batali. As I walked through and saw baby purple potatoes, full, gorgeous heads of radicchio, marbled steaks and hazelnut truffles; the worry of my dating debacles melted away. Food is my passion – it’s what makes me happy. If food is life, and the rest is parsley, then dating is nothing more than tarragon – an addition that very few people actually enjoy, but it finds its way into our lives from time to time to cause us stress and make us ask ourselves, “why the hell am I eating this?”