Full Tilt Something

So in a fit of excess this weekend, we decided that rather than cook dinner like normal, rational, non-spend-crazy people, we would run down to the Happy Chinese Wok and Internet Cafe and load up on the most deliciously bad Chinese food available in the tri-county area. This is a bad idea on many levels - I am poor and allergic to MSG (which this food is coated in), it requires driving out in the 100 degree heat (since they refuse to deliver to my complex), and there is perfectly good food in my house (won't someone please think of the starving children in, like, Africa?).

But anyways, off we went. And it was awesome. It was also huge, because we went during dinner portions, which means they stuff a takeout box to overflowing and then give you a bucket of rice to go along with it. I love the Happy Wok and Internet Cafe. And I didn't even notice that it made me sick, because I was already feeling the effects of some heavy allergy medication I took unrelated to all that (the dork reading is high right now).

I can't be sure why I went through all of that lead up, but now we reach the brunt of my story. So I have more than half of this food left at the end of the night. I return it to its handy carrying case and stick it in the refrigerator for the next day (finally, someone thinks of the children). When lunch comes around the next morning (on a No-Pants Sunday you're allowed to have lunch in the morning. It's a rule that I just made up) I pop that sucker in the microwave and get ready to enjoy some high quality delayed Chinese cuisine.

Only, the act of microwaving day old General Tao chicken seems to have some radical element to it, which causes the chicken to spontaneously harden into these little rock-like elemental parts that defy the general laws of nature. But just because the food is suddenly harder than my teeth, that doesn't mean that I'm not gonna eat it. I mean, seriously. If it was once food I paid for, it will be in my belly, sooner or later.

I toss it all on a plate, grab a fork and dig in. It's not bad. Not bad at all. Nearing the end of the first quarter of the meal, I take the fork and go to cut one of the larger chicken-rocks into a more manageable chicken-pebble size. Now, there may have been some level of resistance, but I do not recall it being that great. But apparently I pushed it a bit too hard. And by a bit, I mean that the fork snapped in half while trying to divide the chicken and proceeded to send every ounce of my lunch in every available direction. There was chicken, carrots, rice, plate, and bits of fork everywhere you could look in my living room.

And this wasn't just some, like, plastic fork that broke under pressure. This was one of my high quality, given to me by my grandmother, stainless steel and faux-crystal forks that she won from her book club. Disastrous.

Have you ever stood in the middle of your living room, coated in rice and day-old Chinese food, holding the useless end of a broken fork on No-Pants Sunday?

It's sort of a low point in your life.