Chicken in the bathtub

In a third world context, “chicken in the bathtub” might mean a live chicken flopping around in a plastic basin of water.
In a first world context, this means, quite literally, that last night I ate rotisserie chicken while taking a bubble bath. This strange pairing happened for one basic reason:  lack of time.

Let me explain. Tuesdays are the worst. After being at work since 8am and then going immediately to French class until 9:30pm,   I am completely dead. Zombie dead. All I want to do is take a shower, eat dinner, and crawl in to bed.

Last night, I decided to go a different route. I’d been nursing sore calves all day (from walking up and down nine floors of stairs…twice…in heels…for exercise. I know, I know, first world problems!) so I decided to run  a bubble bath.

The next idea that came to my head wasn’t all that surprising, considering I am an expert multi-tasker.( I do homework while watching the news, play iphone word games while sitting on the toilet, respond to emails while cooking, Facebook while I’m working- er, maybe that last one doesn’t count.)  Really, I’ll do  anything to save time.

I decided I should just eat dinner while bathing, so I could get to bed sooner. Chicken + bath seemed, in my groggy mind, a good idea at the time and a better alternative than falling asleep at the dinner table with my head on my plate. But honestly, it ended up being kind of a mediocre experience that I probably won’t be doing again. As my fiancé pointed out, “That’s just weird.”

 I don’t know what happens to free time in America, but I suspect it gets sucked into some vortex of Perceived Productivity. Maybe it even gets spit back out in Africa, where it occasionally seemed as if there was nothing but time to kill. How many hours did I spend in Mozambique just waiting for people to show up to a meeting, or chilling in line at the bank?

I assumed that, because I kept up my Moz blog for two years, blogging consistently in America would be a piece of cake, considering the availability of flawless electricity and high speed internet. But as you can see, I’ve all but abandoned this blog.

I’ve been home almost five months and sometimes I feel like it’s gone by faster than a week in Africa.

One minute I’m hanging out on the porch with my dogs, wondering how to escape the African heat, and the next I’m sitting at an office desk scheduling meetings and compiling compliance report data for a multi-billion dollar international tech company.

No wonder I feel the need to eat chicken in the bathtub.