I am a Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup purist. I begrudgingly accept the convenience of the easy open pop top, but prefer the earthy ritual of digging the can open with a hand-cranked can opener.

I prepare and consume Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup virtually every day. It cleanses. Sweat forms on my back and my sinuses erupt when I hold my face over the hot bowl of soup and methodically process the soup from bowl to mouth. My glasses fog up and I often burn my tongue on the scathing liquid, which I generally let boil for 7 to 8 minutes.

The contents of the bowl start off looking like mostly liquid. But the noodles sitting at the bottom gradually appear as the top liquid is consumed. Concurrently, the temperature of the concoction drops, and the naked-seeming noodles are that much more appetizing for their ease of consumption.

I have learned that the noodles must be chewed. Not chewed like steak but processed. Because I save the noodles for last, I must remember this. The noodles must be chewed! A large spoon full of noodles must be chewed. After the sauna-like experience of the top of the soup it is easy to assume that all shall go down with equal exhilaration.

Hot Chicken Noodle Soup is especially good on a hot day. At temperatures nearing 100 degrees I have sat down to a boiling hot bowl of Chicken Noodle Soup and felt the sweat gush from my forehead into the bowl of soup I thus consume. A cleansing, earthy ritual for the summer months.

If I have one issue with Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup, it is that I’d either get rid of the chunks of chicken, or make them seem less pitiful. They look like gum scraped off a tennis shoe, and perhaps their appearance biases me. But I think they have the taste and consistency of string.

I always, always laugh when I see the instructions on the back of the can. It says MIX SOUP + 1 CAN WATER. The first time I remember reading those instructions I put the can down and rummaged through the kitchen gadget drawer looking for something that would measure 1 can. I thought it was an official unit of measurement, like a tablespoon or a cup. I don’t know how many emptied cans of soup I threw away without filling them with water, or when I made the connection that they meant you should fill the emptied soup can with water. And I laugh further just at the sound of the word. Can. I need a can of water. Creative recipes for a spare can of water.

Time flies when you sleep until 1:30 in the afternoon, as I did twice this week. The sun seems like it only goes down, never rises. It’s like living in a Degas, where the colors faded to dim a hundred years before the painting was made.

Modern life isn’t made for nocturnal lifestyles. I had a jury summons a while back, and at the time my routine leaned even farther toward staying up past sunrise and sleeping late into the afternoon. To report to the courthouse, and to possibly sit on a jury, would probably have meant staying awake for most of the week. Would I be excused on these grounds? I don’t know. Isn’t there a night court, or was that just a tv series?

I would seem a rare sort, in that I would like to sit on a jury. Even a boring one. Reporting to the courthouse, the few times I ever have, is a great window into society. A random gathering of humanity from, one presumes, all non-felonious walks of life.

But being tired is never an acceptable excuse. It’s like saying you’re “busy.” When Ronald Reagan was filmed falling asleep in cabinet meetings it was used by some to illustrate his purported aloofness and even air-headedness. Maybe he was just tired. What if he had issued that as a statement, through his press secretary. “I was tired.”

The President was TIRED.

I have known those who see going without sleep as a macho sort of thing.

(What’s a gender-neutral word for macho? Conveying the same idea of steroid-brained, loud-headed unassailability, but gender free? “Heroic”? “Mercenary”? “Bitch”?)
(What’s a less weak thought trailer than “sort of thing”?)

“Pulling an all nighter” was bragged about in college, but what do you bring to a final exam by going 70+ hours without sleep? I would bring little sparkling horsies trotting through the classroom, and I’d watch the letters on the exam pages skid off the desk and trickle away.

Well, I’ve had that experience while wide awake and well rested, but just for fun.

Lack of adequate sleep was, in my vivid experience, a badge of honor in corporate management. Someone pops her head into my office and says we have a meeting in some butthole city at 8am the next day. No overnight travel allowed, we can’t afford it, but your card better not be maxed out because we have to pay 6 times the usual air fare for reserving the flights so late. Questioning the value of a meeting full of people who had no sleep the night before merited no coherent response. I’d get a yelp of “WHAT!” and an arms-crossed, glassy grin.

The unasked, incredulous corporate question: “You need sleep?” My suggestion that a decent night’s sleep might bring more value to the meeting than money saved on hotel rooms seemed to yank the excitement out of the endeavor.

So we’d show up ashen-faced, imagining the end of this meeting the way the pope imagines peace on earth. The people we met with asked what hotel we stayed at. When no one answered we were offered suggestions, as if we didn’t remember which hotel. Somehow we avoided answering the question, avoided admitting that we all stayed up all night, avoided intra-corporate embarrassment, avoided admitting that someone in charge thought this meeting bigger than Yalta.

Sun Jan 11 23:10:43 EST 2004

There is a commercial for Master Card that I do not understand. It usually airs during football games. There’s a guy with hedge clippers trimming a bush into the shape of a football player. The bush is on someone’s front yard. Donovan McNabb (Philadelphia Eagles quarterback) walks out of his house to pick up his morning newspaper. The guy with the hedge clippers sees McNabb and presents him the trimmed bush, evidently in honor of McNabb. McNabb looks at the bush with disdain and says “It’s not my yard.” The guy with the clippers was trying to impress McNabb so as to win tickets to The Big Game. The guy flips a little, realizing he just trimmed the hedges of McNabb’s neighbor. McNabb’s neighbor appears and sees the guy with the clippers slinking away. The neighbor yells “Hey, you!”

That’s the punchline, but what’s missing from this narrative is the background music. The song is “Wishin’ and Hopin’”, sung by Dusty Springfield and covered by many others.

As the commercial fades to exit the Dusty is saying “All you gotta do is hold him and kiss him and squeeze him and love him … ”

So is that what the guy with the hedge clippers has to do to impress Donovan McNabb? If so, what exactly is the guy with the clippers hoping to get from McNabb?

I don’t appreciate the violence in recent commercials. There’s this commercial that shows a trio of corporate types marching to a Big Meeting. The boss asks an underling if he has the information they need for this meeting. The guy says “It’s all up here,” pointing to his head. Then the underling smashes his face into a file cabinet drawer and, for as much as you know so far, drops dead in the hallway.

Cut to the boss, who left his employee dead in the hall. The boss goes to the meeting anyway. (And by the way, that meeting is in a conference room on a high floor of some office building in Manhattan, I’m guessing on or around 57th Street, and the view from the conference room is familiar enough to me I might swear I sat through meetings in that exact room. It could be.)

The boss’ other underling appears, and after apparently getting a death bed brain dump from the first guy, he whispers into the boss’ ear that that other guy told him everything.

Then the violence resumes, as this second underling crashes his face into the conference room table.

It’s unpleasant.

The point of the commercial is that data should be backed up effectively. I don’t know how data backup would have helped the boss in this situation. He was evidently a figurehead with distant flunkies doing work about which he had no concept. This boss prepeared to lead meetings with executive rhetoric and managerial flourishes. The commercial sorta kinda addresses the common issue of basing your business on a single point of failure.

Another commercial shows a guy who bought a digital camera. While showing off his new camera he mumbles the price he paid for it. Someone says she got the same camera online for $50 less than him. The guy, feeling the pain of having wasted money he could have saved shopping online, enters a metaphorical boxing ring. Punches, thuds, black eyes, his body flies about for being punched so hard by some invisible sparring partner. It’s really unpleasant to see. I get the joke, ha ha. But why must the message be so painful?

I wince when these commercials come on. I scramble for the remote. I don’t enjoy them. I don’t like violence. Emotional, physical, political. Anger, to me, is a show of weakness.

So what century did I grow up in? Or as Churchill might have asked: Up in which century did I grow?