Soup's On

I used to associate soup with being sick. I think everyone does. When you are little and you get sick your mom gives you soup. For some it was chicken and stars, others chicken noodle, and just about everyone ate a grilled cheese with their creamy tomato. After my surgery, I associated soup with pain, suffering, and infinity. These sentiments of misery were all due to the fact that for eight weeks I was only able to eat liquid foods, which pretty much just means soup. I did gain an appreciation for the many varieties of soup one can make or find in random delis in New York. However, I recall sitting down at the dinner table, watching my family munch away on some delicious chewy meal, and then bursting into tears at the sight of yet another bowl of soup.

Currently, I associate soup with being poor. That is to say, I am poor and therefore I eat a lot of soup. I would say that on average, I eat soup for lunch anywhere from three to four days a week, and occasionally once or twice a week for dinner. For a while I was getting to eat yummy exciting lunches because my boss rarely had a lunch himself and therefore he'd buy me lunch from wherever he was ordering. That was fantastic. However over the past months I've noticed an increase in lunches as well as days he's out of the office, and therefore, soup, being perfectly inexpensive and easy to make (microwave) is my lunch du jour, almost every jour.

Whenever I first sit down with a bowl of soup I always look at it and think to myself, "yeah right, like this is actually going to fill me up." (And I speak to myself in a doubting sarcastic tone, as you might imagine). But everytime, I hear the spoon clink on the bottom of the bowl, signifying I am now a member of the clean plate club, I am, miraculously full. Soup is filling! It's the broth I guess--must be all the liquid. But even the smallest portion seems to satisfy my hunger. Even better, when 1 pm rolls around I am usually a hungry little hippo. When the boss orders lunch it often doesn't arrive until 1:45 or 2 pm, by which time I contemplating eating the frozen waffles someone left in the fridge a year ago. Two minutes in the microwave, my lunch is good to go!

I have to admit something. I might seem smart, but up until about two months ago I didn't know I could put soup in the microwave. That is to say, I didn't know that canned soup was microwaveable. I knew you couldn't microwave the can, but for some reason I always assumed that law applied to the contents within the can. Yes, I am lacking some brain cells or something. Anyways, once I made the discovery that by simply pouring the canned soup into a bowl the food could be microwaved, and thus digested, I was good to go.

So as I sit here now, blogging on my lunch break, I am eating a delicious bowl of noodles and vegetable soup. I checked my bank account this morning and realized I definitely couldn't afford ordering food today, or probably any day for the next two weeks or so. Soup is the perfect solution to my monetary problems and it's looking likely that this soup diet is going to continue for quite some time. Soup might equal poor to me, but one day, when I own half of Hollywood and am flying to my summer home in Maine on a private jet, maybe I'll ask my personal butler for a bowl of chicken noodle and have a good laugh with my staff about those days as an assistant when soup was a way of life. Then we'll all throw piles of money into the air and maybe drop bags filled with diamonds over somewhere in Kansas (because God knows there's not a whole lot in Kansas except people who love God) and then when I get to Maine I'll just buy the place and try to move it a little closer to California, maybe make Maine and California my own private estates and then I can create the wild bird preserve that I've always wanted and attract bird watchers from all across the globe and... Sorry things got a little out of hand there. Mmm, soup.