How to Read at Lunch

People who know me know that I read a few books a year, and a lot of that happens at lunchtime. Twice in the past week (and once for a minute on Twitter) I was discussing reading with someone, and mentioned that I read at lunch, and both times in person the people I was talking to were shocked, as if reading at lunch was some kind of achievement.

"How do you manage to do that?"

My initial thought was, "I open the book. Then I look at the page," but then I started thinking that maybe this really was something that people had trouble figuring out. Since I manage to get in a good hour of reading time three to five lunches a week, I thought about it on my way home tonight and broke down some basic rules of reading at lunch. These are the things that I do when I don't have a lunch meeting or a lunch invitation:

1) Leave your workspace. If you stay at your desk, you are still working. If you shut your door, people are going to knock on it. If you leave your door open, people are going to think you're a slacker who sits around your desk reading instead of doing work. Even if people don't knock, the phone will ring. You can let the calls go to voicemail, but then you know that you're going to have to listen to them after lunch, and you'll be tempted to listen to them now to get them out of the way. Again, there's a simple solution: leave your workplace during lunchtime. Take your book and lunch with you, or take your book to the place where you buy lunch.

2) Own your lunch time. If you get an hour for lunch, take the entire hour. If you have a half hour, take the whole half hour. If the first assistant gets twenty minutes and you get fifteen when she returns, because someone must man the desk and answer the phones at all times, then take your fifteen minutes. It is your time. You have earned it. It belongs to you. Yes, you have a lot of work to do. You'll still have a lot of work to do after lunch. Let it sit for an hour. If you're in the middle of an emergency or your director suddenly needs a report before a meeting in an hour, stay and handle what needs to be handled, but then take a lunch, and take the whole thing.

3) Leave your phone. Unless you're reading a book on your phone, you don't need your phone. What's the point of leaving work to go read if you bring work with you? If you're going to do that, you might as well just stay at your desk.

4) Be prepared to say no to people. I eat lunch at the dining facility closest to my office most days of the week. I know ninety percent of the people who eat lunch there, so at least once or twice a week someone will ask who I'm eating with, and then ask if I want to sit with them. Most days, I politely decline. "No, thanks, I'm going to read," sounds a little better than, "No, thanks, I have a book," but use whatever fits your style.

5) Be prepared to sometimes say yes to people. Every once in a while, when people ask if I want to sit with them, I say yes. If you say no every time, eventually people will stop asking you. If that's your goal, by all means ignore this rule, but if you still want to have friends and friendly coworkers, it's ok to randomly say yes. Just be sure to mention that you were planning to read, so that next time they see you with a book they won't be offended if you say no to their invitation.

6) One hand for food, one hand for reading material. These should not be the same hand, unless you like your books smeared with lunch.

If you're planning to read at lunch, I hope this helps.

warm for the holidays

I still can’t bend my head around how warm it is here. Christmas in Tennessee, for me anyway, is a season of absurdities.

Today at lunch, according to the thermometer in my car, it was 75 Fahrenheit, and I saw this on Market Square when I went to meet Lauren:



If you just look at the tree on concrete, you could kind of pretend it’s cold and windy, until you turn around and notice the wreaths:



Green grass. Lights wrapped around living trees that are not evergreens. The mind boggles.

Fortunately there are wonderful things that can take your mind off of holiday oddness:



That tree could have been on fire outside and I wouldn’t have noticed.

chef joel's lunch recipe

Almost every day at work we eat lunch across the street at the café under the basketball arena. Unfortunately for us, the café closed last week, and won’t open again for six more weeks, so we’ve been bringing in our own lunches for a week. This has given me time to discover that bringing in your own lunch gets boring really quickly.

It takes about a week, in fact.

This is baffling to me. When we talked about how we’d have to do this, it didn’t seem that bad. After all, I brought my own lunch to school every day from kindergarten to graduation, and most days it was peanut butter and grape jelly. I was a really picky eater, and still am, and didn’t trust the school lunch people to provide something I would actually want to eat every day, so I spent over a decade eating the same thing every day instead.

I must have had a lot more willpower when I was younger, because I was already getting bored with turkey and cheese this week. To spice it up, I decided to try flavoring my mayonnaise instead, because I used to get a turkey sandwich at a bread store near my old job that had a delicious pesto mayo on it, and I thought, “I like pesto, and I like mayo. How hard can it be?”

It was actually pretty easy, and after it sat in the fridge all night it was really good. Someone at lunch asked what the recipe was, and I had to laugh. I’m much more “Semi-Homemade” than I am “Top Chef”, so the recipe looked like this:



If anybody is really curious, though, it was two spoons of mayo and one spoon of pesto.