Love is Dinner for Two, Part 1

This is part 1 of a short series of entries using food to document my most significant romantic relationships to date.

My friend Zoe just lent me Rob Sheffield's Love is a Mix Tape. I started reading it at JFK airport yesterday morning en route to LA, a week stay before my big trip to Taiwan. I read a short 30 pages before I opted to listen to a podcast of This American Life. It was just too Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, and what I was really in the mood for was US Weekly's What was Britney Thinking?! What I did get though was that this Rob Sheffield man, who is apparently very famous, is a music geek. And I love geeks. Geeks are cool as long as there is an adjective to qualify the word "geek." And what makes a geek a geek? Compulsion. Expertise. Passion. An obession that forces one to only be able to think and interact through the lens of that obsession.

So Music geek? Cool. Basketball geek? Sexy. Computer geek? Wealthy. And of course there's my favorite, The Food Geek. Whether you obsess over regional Italian olive oils or have never actually cooked anything yourself but are exchanging death threats on Eater.com to HungreeMan38, who repeatedly gives negative reviews because of "bad serivce" (This is New York people! You aren't dining at Commander's Palace in New Orleans!), a food geek will forget names, dates, and locations, but always remember the food. So as Rob Sheffield immortalizes his lost, dead wife by revisiting the scores of mixtapes the lovers once exchanged, unable to sever tunes and lyrics with image and memory, I similarly link boyfriends with food, restaurants, and what we ate and cooked.

Boyfriend 1, Mister C. Louie:

I was 17 years old, weeks away from graduating high school. I had never kissed a boy and was a late-bloomer on all accounts. I had recently discovered the art of flirting and was effortlessly perfecting this when Mr. Louie sent his first Instant Message. Hours of IMing came and went, days (in post high school language: months) passed before we finally made plans to interact as real people. No longer would I be just a screenname, and no longer would he try to seduce me through smiley faces and and loud, roaring LOLs.

There are a few things I remember most about Mr. Louie. He was really skinny. This seemed to set the mold for all of my boyfriends thereafter, but he was really skinny, possibly the skinniest of them all. I'm guessing he weighed no more than 10 pounds more than me even though he was 5 inches taller, and I was thin thin thin. He also took diet pills he got at the mall and carried this weird designer purse which he refused to call a purse but looked eerily similar to um, a purse. Mr. Louie wanted to be a model and was always watching what he ate. Even in my high school naivete I excused this dream of his as misled, pathetic even, although who's the one in the Mercedes commercial now? Naturally, this Mary-Kate behavior bothered me; I had always eaten unhibited and unobstructed. So what is my culinary memory of Mister Louie, which is so appropriately symbolic? Microwaved boca burger patties scantily covered in Heinz ketchup.

THIS IS not microwaved boca burgers, but pork chops and homemade tomato sauce over a bed of white rice. Served with afternoon champagne one Winter afternoon by my love, Boyfriend 4.