No Jacket Required

Back when I was a working stiff, I used to say that work was easy; lunch, on the other hand, was hard. I worked for a few years in San Mateo, and in that time my colleagues and I quickly exhausted the possibilities -- we ate at every restaurant, fast food joint and taqueria in town, at least twice. Things eventually got so bad that at one point we added the food court at the Hillsdale shopping mall to our rotation. (No one over the age of eighteen should have the term "Hot Dog on a Stick" enter into his workplace idiom.) It's easily one of the greatest benefits of escaping the corporate 8:30-to-5 grind -- eating lunch wherever the hell I want. What's even more gratifying is the luxury of making lunch at home, where the culinary possibilities are limited only by my own imagination.

Speaking of lunch ... maybe two years ago, an old friend from my Toronto days managed to track me down through my parents. She still lived in Toronto, and for a brief period we communicated regularly, on the phone and via e-mail. I guess because she wanted to get a sense of what my daily life was like, she'd frequently ask me two questions: what I was wearing that day, and what I had for lunch. If, similarly, you too have had occasion to ponder what I like to call the iconography of my daily life, the following should provide a fair amount of insight, as you'll get to see what I wore and also what I had for lunch last Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.