Dinner With the Fishes

Josh and I have gotten out of the habit of going on weekly dates. It was so easy when we were first married to consider any activity a "date", that we didn't really go out of our apartment much. And now that we have children we've sort of allowed our own habit of laziness and abhorrence of planning to overwhelm our urge for date night. In other words, we don't go on many dates. Not deliberately, in any case.

This is extra pathetic since my sister is living with us for the rest of the year, and she just happens to have Friday nights off from work so she can absolutely babysit for us. She's even urged us to go on dates and insisted that we let her babysit. We have totally wasted this unique opportunity to date over the summer and I'm just now starting to feel the pings of regret from it.

So, to sate my conscience, I insisted we go to dinner together on Friday. Josh had been wanting to try Red Lobster for several months now (a perfect example of how apathetic we are--Josh cares just enough to want to eat somewhere but not enough to do anything about it for several months. We need help.), so we decided to try it out. I know it's a chain restaurant and there's one every ten feet throughout the southwest, but neither of us had ever tried it before. We ventured to the nearest one and found its substantial parking lot completely crammed with cars. Not a single parking spot in sight, including the side of the road where several cars had parked against the sidewalk outlining the parking lot. I don't know if there was some fancy shindig going down at this particular restaurant or we had chosen the busiest time to eat or if Red Lobster was the greatest dining experience known to man, but we were not willing to wade through the crowd of people standing outside the doors to find out how long our wait time would be. Instead we drove the extra fifteen minutes to the next nearest one.

This one was deceptively larger on the inside than the outside. We walked into a dim gray-colored foyer with a tank of depressed lobsters next to the host desk. The air smelled like high-powered air conditioning with a faint undertone of fish. That felt about right, so we ventured to put our names down and discovered our wait would be about ten minutes. Not too shabby. I went over to the tank and stared at the soulless eyes of the giant ocean bugs before saying quietly, "You're all going to be dead soon." It wasn't a taunt so much as a statement of surprised awareness. There's something kind of chilling about seeing your food alive and (I think) happy(?) before you plan on eating it.

In any case, we were seated quickly and surrounded by a lot of old people. I mean, a LOT of old people. It was still somewhat early for dinner, I guess. We'd left for dinner around 5 or 5:30 and with the extra driving and the waiting, it couldn't have been quite six o'clock yet. Happy hour for the elderly, I guess. It did sort of feel like we had encroached upon their turf and that we should leave the restaurant and let them claim it for their generation. But we stayed and ordered lobster-artichoke dip as an appetizer (I hope the lobster meat came from one of the already-dead specimens in the kitchen and not from the tank in the front). We had a couple of boring side salads and then I ate a parmesan-crusted tilapia and Josh enjoyed a seafood platter with crab legs, lobster tail, and shrimp.

I'm not much of a seafood eater so I played it safe and I'm glad I did. I enjoyed my meal. Josh had a little trouble figuring out how to crack open crab legs (he asked the waitress, who was really helpful) and then he had a whole lot of fun eating all the food. We both agreed the crab meat was the tastiest, although it was a lot of work for a little bit of food. And I had to maintain my distance from all the exoskeleton cracking and avoid touching the creepy pointy claws while Josh yanked and ripped open the body of some poor crab. I normally struggle pulling apart chicken bones so I usually buy boneless meats from the grocery store; seafood "bones" make me even more squeamish because they're even creepier-looking, so I was pretty uncomfortable during the meat-gathering portion of our meal.

As the evening progressed, the restaurant seemed to fill with even more geriatrics. They came out of the woodwork. It was peculiarly unsettling to see so many old people congregate to the same location. I don't have any problem with old people but I'm not used to seeing so many in one place and this was definitely more than a few. It was bizarre.

Our conversation was really fun and we both managed to avoid talking about our kids, which we sometimes struggle to do on dates. We don't date often but when we do, we try to make the conversation about us and our personal interests rather than our little brood, to ensure that we're working on our roles as spouses rather than our roles as parents. It was a delightful evening. I was reminded once again how much I love my husband. He's so easy to talk to and he has wonderfully interesting things to say. As a decided and committed introvert, it's sometimes difficult for me to coax conversation out of him at home. He can happily spend an evening silently engrossed in technology. I have to force more than one-syllable responses from him when he's particular enthralled in his chosen entertainment. But removed from technology and focused solely on decent food in a semi-private environment, Josh is resplendent. We discussed stock options and their effects on companies (Josh had to clarify a few minor points of confusion for me), growing up in the west, Tinder, eastern European culture, cost-of-living raises, the hierarchy of management, and a myriad of other random-but-somehow-fluidly-connected topics. I had so much fun and hated to leave but nursing mothers have an internal ticking clock for separating from their young, so we had to head back home.

Upon arrival, we discovered my poor sister holding a screaming James and standing beside a screaming Scarlet. Scarlet didn't want to get ready for bed so she was vocally protesting, and James did not appreciate having been put in his swing earlier in the evening and was also vocally protesting. Josh and I each chose a child and went right back to our roles as parents. We love our life and we love our children, but it was immeasurably pleasant to spend a couple of hours taking care of our other roles. It made returning to our parental responsibilities even more enjoyable.