Yesterday, I, a full-grown man, made 32 chicken nuggies for dinner, and that’s it. No vegetables, no fruits, and barely any grains. Just processed chicken warmed up on a baking sheet.

I fell far short of my reading goal yesterday, too, getting through only four chapters of Ten Years in the Tub and one chapter of Midnight’s Children.

Mondays are by far the worst day of the week for me, and not just because I’m grumpy and/or emulating a lasagna-loving cartoon character. Mondays are just my longest day, when I’m at school for between 10 and 11 hours. Yesterday was also the first day of Spring semester, which means new seating charts, new lesson plans, and a handful of new students. I was physically sore when I got home, having easily met my 10,000 steps in the course of a normal day’s teaching.

“Is it my shoes? Is that the problem?”

By the time I got home and took care of a few other matters (contacting my university to register for online classes), I was ready to crawl into bed without supper, so I suppose I should be glad I managed to cook anything at all.

I don’t know how to make Mondays more manageable. I hear one of you shouting from the gallery, “Eat healthier and exercise!” but I’m pretending not to hear it. There’s also a proud mid-westerner deep in me saying, “Tough it out, sissy! Everybody works long hours,” but I’m also pretending not to hear that.

Because I’m a man and men refuse help.

Midnight’s Children is a reading like a stark counterpoint to Ten Years in the Tub. I believe I equated Nick Hornby’s articles to little bonbons of humor that I was stuffing my face with in my last post. Salman Rushdie’s book, by that metaphor, is a pretentious Michelin-star meal served by an unsmiling chef and a waiter who has a special single-tined fork that he wants you to use for the second course. “It’s a salmon reduction with carbonated orange foam served on a single sheet of Gandhi’s autobiography. To eat it, scratch out any conjunctions you see on the paper with your unifork, snort the orange foam, then give the salmon reduction a sensual kiss.”

Is it well written? Absolutely. But, resoundingly, it is not a bonbon.

I’m pretty sure the main character in Midnight’s Children is supposed to represent all of India. And WTF? Who is so full of themselves that they think they can capture one of the most populated countries in the world with a single character in a single book?

Salman Rushdie, that’s who!

Anyways. I’m going to need to read up on India’s history if I want to interact with the novel on a meaningful level, which is always a good sign. One should be forced to do some research to read a novel. I mean, it sure would suck if a book contained everything you needed to enjoy it between its covers!

This is overly harsh. Maybe I really am a Garfield.

I’m going to crawl under a blanket and ponder this.