Almo'oonds.

I'll admit, I'm definitely not the most thrilling person you'll ever meet... especially when it comes to what I eat for lunch. For a large portion of my life, I brown bagged it. My lunches were predictable and I loved them.

Some things never change. Since starting work in the city, I've been frequenting the same lunch venue (occasionally even on Saturdays...) They have what I like to call this "Subway" for salads concept going on where you can choose all of the mix-in options and they make it in front of you. So everyday I go and I order the same salad. But recently I've sort of become addicted to this place because I am fascinated with the man behind the salad counter.

Since I don't know his name, I will refer to him as Mr. Almo'oond because whenever I ask for almonds in my salad he always repeats the word back to me as if asking me a question, almo'oonds? [this spelling is my attempt at his accent]. So every day I order almonds, almost as an experiment at this point, to see if he'll repeat it back to me. I'm starting to question whether it is him or myself who pronounces the word incorrectly.

However, lately my experiment has been taken to a new level. Mr. Almo'oond, has started to chat with me as I'm order, which means he definitely remembers me. We've discussed a number of subjects [my excitement to leave New York, being from Virginia, Bon Jovi, the public waterfalls- you name it, we've discussed it] but for some reason I'm still getting the almo'oonds question. It's like he can retain all this other information about me, but still feels the need to question my choice of nut in my salad. I don't know what this all means, but I'm starting to think I might have to eat a whole lot of almonds to find out.