wednesday (treats gone wrong)
This food is bad, I say to my dog. Give it to me, he replies.
I can see the person making this food. They are making $10,000mxn a month, about $700usd. Their boss pays them late or not at all. Their wage doesn’t allow them to live anywhere near the restaurant, the commute was already two hours before the city starting ripping apart the metro to make it look cute for the four Word Cup games that will be played here in June. Now the commute is four hours, van to bus to train to bus to bottleneck to train to bus. It’s hot in the restaurant, outside it’s 30 degrees Celsius, in the kitchen it’s 40 going on 500.
They get the order: japchae with rice, one order each of fried chicken in soy sauce, in gochugang sauce, and original with no sauce. They take a spoon of rice and toss it a white ecological paper box, then grab some tongs to stab some japchae out of a massive plastic tub and dump it on top of the rice. The japchae giggles listlessly, matching the worker’s mood. They use the same tongs to grab nine pieces of chicken — if I had known that each order included three pieces I wouldn’t have ordered so much — out of another plastic tub. The chicken was fried in the morning, before it got too hot. They microwave the chicken then dump three pieces in a vinegary gochujang sauce that tastes vaguely like Frank’s RedHot and three more in a sickly-sweet soy mixture that tastes like, I don’t know, syrup? They wrap each set of three in aluminum foil so that it steams on the table while the Uber Eats driver arrives.
Meanwhile, the Uber Eats driver, tired of risking his life delivering pizzas for assholes like me, is sweating through his motorcycle helmet a ten-minute ride away. He copies a message in fake AI customer service voice with a ton of emojis encouraging me to give him a thumbs up after he delivers my food. Just once I want a food delivery person to send me a horny version of that message like Erica and Isidore always send me on holidays: LUBE UP YOUR TIGHT HOLE BECAUSE YOU GOT A BIG THICK WET DELIVERY ON THE WAYYYY etc. Anyway he doesn’t move from his spot until I reply, giving the chicken more time to cool down and get soggy.
As I wait I’m scrolling through TikTok. I pause on a guy who is yelling into his phone about Meghan Trainor cancelling her tour. I wish I could afford to go! he’s yelling. I wish I could go to restaurants and movie theaters and big stadium concerts but I can’t afford anything! I bet everyone in my generation (he’s young) thinks that too! I’ve been thinking of ordering from this restaurant for weeks but I haven’t because ordering food tends to be expensive, much more expensive than just going somewhere, and having bad food delivered to you is much worse than having bad food at a restaurant where there’s usually something interesting happening. Before I ordered my food I had turned my oven on to bake some fish sticks and have fish sticks with salad and rice noodles, one of my favorite meals, but decided, it’s really hot I don’t want to have my oven on and also I deserve a little treat because I just did a photoshoot and before I did the photoshoot I got through a panic attack caused by the nasty little man who lives inside of me and wants me to spend the rest of my life having panic attacks, slamming my head into heavy wooden signs, showing up three hours late and/or to the wrong location, blaming other people for things that have nothing to do with them, blocking them on Instagram, and so on.
I deserved a treat so I ordered myself some food and sat with my dog, who has been panting all day. It’s hot and the air is humid and heavy, it feels like someone put a big wet towel on the city hoping we’d cool off but suffocating us instead. I was going to stop and have a couple of tacos and michelada on my way home from the photoshoot but I wanted to see my dog, who I assumed was hot. Also I was carrying two hangers of clothes and the makeup was starting to feel uncomfortable on my face. Having a taco arabe and a taco de costilla with a michelada at Hayito would have cost me less than $200mxn. My delivery cost more than twice that and I threw most of it out. Me encantó, says my booker at the modeling agency.