Houston's Emerald Kale Salad, the Best Recipe Dupe

Every year around this time, something weird happens to me. It’s a strange sensation, an odd feeling on which I can’t totally put my perfectly French manicured finger.

Normally, I am a fanstasmagical fairy who gracefully juggles multiple competing priorities, but I can’t seem to focus enough to hold up one single thing. I drop stuff. I bump into walls. I forget appointments. I leave things behind and lose them. I become slightly off center. Unbalanced. A lot of people say the same things about….being in love.

oooOOOoooh. Right. Well, wrong, but that does remind me...

Then I look at the calendar and realize what time of the year it is. What time of the month it is. It’s that time, and unfortunately, we're not talking about Miller. It’s early February, which leads to the beginning of mid-February, and since February is a short month with 28 days, the middle of February is neither half of 30 days, which is the 15th nor half of 31 days, which is the cusp of the 15th and 16th, but is half of 28, which is the 14th. There is something about February 14th, the dead center of the month.

Dead.

Center.

It’s payday!

Unless, of course, you are paid bi-weekly, which is every two weeks, instead of semi-monthly which is twice a month, which never made sense to me because aren’t they the exact same effin' thing?!?!

What it is that I really feel is not unbalancementedness, nor is it a desire to manufacture brand new words because I have a limited vocabulary of my own; it is stress. I feel this underwhelmingly overwhelming pressure to perform, and not just perform, but perform in accordance with the standard operating procedure for Valentine’s Day. I have Valentine’s Day performance anxiety. Make royally painfully iced heart-shaped sugar cookies. Bake red velvet cupcakes. Write love letters. Make dinner. Make reservations. Take long sips of sparkling rosé and seduce you like the alarmingly charming siren that I am. In my head.

Easy. I mean, seriously. Drink sparkling rosé?

No, you see, the real performance is here. The Delicious Life. I am expected to compose a brilliantly biting, sarcastic, witty, clever, well-thought-out, thematically unified piece about how much I H-A-T-E Valentine’s Day. I have to spew bitterness about past loves lost, about present loves absent, and future loves impossible. I have to flood my post’s paragraphs with brilliant business analysis about how the Holiday Hell Council composed of the DeBeers, Godiva, and FTD trifecta built an outstanding marketing strategy to frighten men into wild, wasteful spending on a single day. I have to make scathing social commentary on commercialization, capitalization, and punctuation, which is all just a thinly veiled attempt at hiding how much I really just want to be romanced out of my mind…because being a bitter young maid on Valentine’s Day is more fun than a stupid silly sighing fool.

However, and this is a huge “however,” the pressure for high-performance Valentine’s Day writing is purely a figment of my imagination. I don’t “have to” do anything! This is a blog. It’s my blog, for fox ache. I don’t even get paid. Pressure comes from nowhere else except the tiny little editor who is sitting inside my own gorgeous head. Though I seem to think of myself as a mostly rational, logical, and completely sane person, I have very little control over this teeny tiny-but-powerful pearlescent chip embedded in my psyche that actively seeks out melodramatic, high-intensity stress. There is a stress-seeking missile in my brain that wants to explode back at “The Editor” and really, it’s all evidence that I have a massive fear of being a disappointment.

So rather than dealing with the possibility of failing at Valentine's Day, I’m going to do the mature thing. I’m going to avoid it! Instead, let me tell you about why it is absolutely certain that I will likely still have a chance to write all of that on Valentine’s Day anyway. I will be at home on Valentine’s Day instead of out with some unnamed hot suitor because for some ungodly reason, suitors who come through into my Delicious Life are real winners like one whom I shall call Mr. Awesome, not because he is awesome, but because, well, you'll see.

Reasons Why Sarah Will Not be Out with Mr. Awesome on Valentine's Day, or Any Other Day For That Matter:

1. He chose Houston’s for dinner.

   No. Comment. (And I guess it's not really fair since I like Bandera.)

2. He said he likes Houston’s and goes there with his friends who think Houston's is fun.

   Even if he and I actually ended up dating in some totally stoned version of this universe, we could never hang out with his friends because they like Houston's.

3. He chose Houston’s.

   Did I say that already? I did, but I had to say it again because I bet you didn't believe it the first time.

4. When we got into his car, he asked me what kind of car I drive.

   For several reasons, this irritated me on the inside (but not on the outside! I still had to eat dinner!). Does it matter what kind of car I drive? No. Is it that either 1) I don't drive a car that is good enough or 2) I don’t drive a car that is better than his? What the fuck is a “better” car anyway? Am I supposed to be impressed with his car? Cars do not impress me, and his car was not any car that would impress me to begin with anyway. So really, he has no right to ask me anything. If he actually drove a goddamned Tesla Roadster, I would be impressed because a Tesla Roadster is an impressive car and it’s environmentally friendly. His question irritated me, my reaction irritated me even more, and I think that it was just leftover irritation from "Houston's." I should have told him that I drive a Ferrari. But only when my driver is on vacation. Or maybe I should have told him I only take the Big Blue Bus because I don't go out much. Because I don't shower.

5. He told me an MBA is useless.

   Ouch. That one stung and I had to force myself to keep my lips clamped into a tight little line so that I wouldn’t start spewing out backwash-laced haterade on his precious little certification that isn’t even a degree, but a TLA (that's "three-letter-acronym" for the unvernacularized) that he can print on a homemade business card because paid a lot of money to take some tests. Though I very often proclaim that I do not have a “list” of qualifying characteristics, education is actually on my phantom list because education is important to me. I may have been rejected from Stanfurd three times, but I’m still proud of my education, and any diss to my education is taken with a lot of offense. I know education is not synonymous with intelligence, but still, it symbolizes a commitment to something! Or something. At the same time, though, this is a hard one for me to argue because technically, I am in total agreement with his statement. An MBA is useless. However, only MBAs are allowed to make fun of their degrees. I never make fun of how utterly useless, and in fact, almost laughable, a JD is, do I?!?!

6. At the bar, in Houston's, he ordered a sugary sweet cocktail.

   It was pink. It wasn’t a Cosmo, but I swear its name was something like FruityPebbliciousMetrotini, with a Razberri Kiss. I ordered a vodka on the rocks and sucked it down in about 45 seconds, then ordered a second Butch-tini and took it to the table.

Lessons of the day? Don’t stress about Valentine’s Day and don’t ever take Sarah to Houston’s and order a fucking salad.

(Incidentally, I went there for lunch recently and the food aside from the burger is unmistakably atrocious. Houston's has gone the way of Asian fusion, with a very heavy emphasis on the "ew" of fusion. Spicy tuna was rolled up with what tasted like coleslaw made with Miracle Whip. The vegetable of the day was curried cauliflower, and from about six feet away, it looked promising. When it arrived, the sadly over-steamed florets were drowning in a yellow sauce that tasted vaguely like French's mustard and garnished with the dregs from a can of Planters Mixed Nuts. I didn't even venture to try more than a bite of the Thai Steak Salad. The noodles in the bite that were in desperate need of a quick dunk in hot water to loosen them up.)

** a year ago today, my soup was barley legal **