Sharing is Staring
Week of June 22nd to June 28th, 2021.
During your year at home of harshly judging yourself privately, you forgot how many opportunities there are to harshly judge yourself publicly. Lucky for you, restaurants in New York no longer have to restrict any seating, which means you can once again slurp down your soup at a community table—a ripe opportunity to remember all of the ways in which you weren’t insecure for fifteen months, and can now resume being once more.
Your communal table insecurities are a complicated web.
Lately you’ve been feeling shy about the way you hold your chopsticks because last week your friend said “You know you can use a fork if you want” when you were trying really hard to appear confident as you tried and failed to grab the last couple dan dan noodles.
Your regular consumption of sushi has made you a complacent chopstick user. You’re so accustomed to making wide grabs for kitade doko that you’ve lost any ability (though it’s unclear if you ever really had any) to deftly grab a few slender noodles.
You thought your battle was internal, but it was nice of your friend to bring it out in the open like that, with three or four noodles left on the table.
With your chopstick confidence shot, you’re worried the communal table is rich, fertile ground for cruel stares as you fail to be the person you wish you were (effortless chopstick user, musically gifted, able to ride a bike with confidence).
The particular communal table you encounter this week is one of those wide ones where you sit beside your dinner date instead of across from them. These particular set ups are challenging for you because although you spend your life in fear that you are the gravitational pull in the room and are upsetting someone somehow, you also have a terrible habit of staring at people.
You never learned not to stare. Quite the contrary, growing up you played a game where your Dad would point to someone and you’d get to invent an entire backstory for them. This wonderful game helped teach you to stare at people and make up lies about them, which has helped you blossom into a truly insufferable adult.
It’s nearly impossible for you to resist the temptation of staring at strangers when they’re right across the gorgeous wooden communal table (say what you will about the feeling of communal tables Virgo, but they always look amazing) from you. Each group of diners demands your study, your gaze, your idle wonderment about the dynamics of their friendship—is everyone an equal tier of friend to everyone? Or is it kind of a two best friends and two best friends sort of outing? Perhaps it’s this obsessive behavior that makes you think everyone else notices you in this way too.
In your nervous panic of being center stage, (again, literally no one was looking at you) you mistakenly order a hot tea and a bowl of soup on an 88 degree evening.
The whole meal you worry that you are using your chopsticks in a way that you’ll never be able to socially recover from. The communal table diners will tell the whole town (you live in a big town) that you aren’t a confident chopstick user and cannot hold dominion over your broth.
You’ll sweat through the entirety of the meal, from the heat of the soup, the tea, and the spotlight (again, truly no one was looking at you).
People go out to dinner for a variety of reasons, Virgo. Some enjoy dining out for the sensuous pleasures of eating delicious cuisine. Many wish to connect with friends in a pleasant environment while enjoying a meal. Others simply wish to avoid cooking at all costs.
Though the reasons for coming to the restaurant may differ person to person, their similarities are clear: people are typically not venturing into the hot Brooklyn air in June with the sole purpose of thinking about you and your eating habits.
If any of your fellow diners noticed you, it was likely paired with the thought, “For what reason could such a sweaty woman find so many reasons to stare at me?”