Originally published on August 20th, 2015.
Tonight, my wife and I had dinner in San Francisco at a lovely restaurant called The House of Prime Rib. We had heard mostly positive things about the place, so Jen decided to place reservations for us to eat there a month in advance. She’s gets pretty serious when it comes to her food. Every week she’d say something along the lines of “one day closer to prime rib!” It made me laugh a lot.
Jen and I, if you didn’t know, are Food Network junkies. We saw the House of Prime Rib featured once in one of those “THE BEST OF THE BEST” episodes that plug the gaps between the bouts of Guy Fieri acting obscenely, guzzling down food as though he were a Hummer that transformed into a person.
I kind of resembled him tonight as I was stuffing prime rib into my mouth while at the same time, looking like the most awful person to be with. After being with Jen for five years, she doesn’t even bother to react anymore. When one of us looks or does something ridiculous in a public space, we just make eye contact, smile, and shake our heads. It’s quite nice.
To sum up the experience: the server was nice and professional, there was a lot of good food, and I had a blast. I even ordered a glass of their cheapest wine. How could you not sit in amazement when all around you are carts full of steak whizzing by you on wheels?
While I was losing my s*** over all the food that was in front of me, I noticed a family sitting nearby.
They were a bit older. Taking my best guess at the time (the glass of wine may have impaired my judgement), they were dressed in 60s attire-kind of like an Asian version of the Kennedy’s having dinner. Each family member had ordered the King Henry VIII cut and sat there expressionless, like silhouettes. More than looking seemingly unimpressed at the food steaming in front of them, it looked like the things that excited them in life had dulled.
In my little bubble of naiveté, I just took my mouth and stomach to Disneyland. We ate the rest of our meal happily and left.
I gave some thought about the sad looking family on the drive back home to Santa Clara. Maybe their happiness had completely plateaued. In my wild imagination, as it tends to do so, I figured things may have just gotten better and better from the ages of 0 to 35, and then the unthinkable happened: things got boring.
They’ve vacationed 100,000 times to everywhere. They’ve lived among beavers and swam with a pod of whales in the Arctic. They’ve skydived and space-dived. They’ve spanked that adrenaline monkey so hard it’s dead. Nothing impresses them anymore. It’s like continuing to drink just so that the hangover never catches up.
It is no wonder then, why this magical world of flying meat carts and Disneyland for the taste buds would bring such sadness into their lives. Goodnight.