Date Night

Just a twenty-minute post (twenty minutes to write, not to read—I won’t waste such a large portion of your awake-time on this) to let you know that my life isn’t all chronic-illness-and-PhD fun.

Nope: sometimes my husband and I go on random dates. Random in both the relatively unplanned sense and the appropriately bizarre one.

It’s been a stressful summer, in many regards—like, all of them—and we were in desperate need of a night “on the town.” I suspect that our definition of “on the town” varies slightly from other couples’, but I’m cool with that.

First stop: Guu Sakabar. My husband asked, when choosing a restaurant, how adventurous I was willing to be, which was an extremely fair question given my usual dietary preferences. I think he was surprised when I readily agreed to Guu and ordered marinated jellyfish (along with a sashimi salad containing delicious fish that I didn’t think to ask to have identified). You only live once: might as well branch out from plain pitas, grilled chicken, and romaine lettuce every once in a while. I give it an A+, not that I have any business pretending to be qualified as a food critic.

Next: pen shopping. For all you Toronto romantics out there, Midoco on Bloor West makes for a great date activity. I bought a uni-ball vision micro in blue; he bought the same model in black. Further evidence that we’re meant for each other.

Finally, we went to Fiesta Farms, an uppish-scale grocery store. Grocery shopping is one of the activities we love best. In fact, we walk to our local Loblaws, approximately twelve minutes away, several times a week. Exercise and the running of an errand all wrapped up in one—does it get any better than that?? (Answer: yes. It gets much, much better than that.) We’d been looking for an excuse to visit Fiesta Farms for months: date night was it. It lived up to our expectations. We purchased food.

Our plan had been to go home and clean because somehow that seemed like a reasonable idea, but instead we watched Wet Hot American Summer, an uncharacteristic choice for people whose Netflix history is composed primarily of documentaries and, I will admit, an abundance of BBC miniseries. “Watched” is a bit of a stretch since I’m incapable of sitting down in front of the TV and focusing on what’s playing even when it’s a masterpiece I’d actually like to see (this feature film didn’t, unsurprisingly, fall into that category), so there’s that, but it was nonetheless entertaining.

There you have it. No seizures, just a classic date night—marinated jellyfish, pen shopping, a visit to a new-to-us grocery store, and the viewing of a film that has a score of 32% on Rotten Tomatoes.

It was just what the proverbial doctor ordered.