According to Hofmann: The dinner of our discontent
If the bumper stickers I’ve seen are true, then I understand we have to coexist as well as have Calvin from the comic strip “Calvin and Hobbs” urinate on various logos and emblems that we hate.
That’s a very hard thing to do considering we have to sit down and tolerate each other at the dinner table — by that, I mean the coexisting part at the dinner table, not the urination part.
Anyway, it’s true if you get two people — no matter whether their strangers, friends or family — to sit down for a meal, they’ll find the other person’s eating habit or habits or hobbits as annoying as fingernails scratching across a chalkboard.
Of course, most people wouldn’t tell their companion that, instead believing and hoping they’d change.
As a personal note, my wife becomes infuriated at any eating sound I make that’s a tenth of a decibel louder than ambient noise. In addition to that, she also becomes maddened at the dinner table when I gulp liquid, breathe air when I eat, talk with my mouth full, belch out my comments on the food, lift my leg to pass gas, and, of course, dinner-table urination — the list of complaints from that bloodthirsty dictator I married never ends!
Of course, my wife isn’t perfect either as she does this thing during a meal that I cannot stand (like opening her mouth to complain about my eating habits).
Another antagonizing eating habit comes from my mother, who manages to make a slurping sound when she eats. It’s not just a slurping sound when she eats soup, she does it with any type of food; she could be eating dry crackers and make the slurping sound.
With that being said, it’s hard — nay, impossible — to find an annoyance-free food just like it’s impossible to find annoyance-free people.
What you need to do is identify all those little disturbing eating quirks early on to decide if the person can be somewhat tolerable at the dinner table. The normal answer is it can never be tolerated, but it’s always important to gauge these types of things.
To do gauge that, you have to watch them eat what’s hands down the worst food to eat that invites all of those sights and sounds and perhaps smells that cause such annoyances, and that food is spaghetti.
There are so many pitfalls in spaghetti — a strand breaking loose over lip and chin, the urge to suck up a lingering noodle, there’s a lot of fork-scraping potential on the plate, odd methods of twirling spaghetti, spaghetti-sauce spittle flying off the plate and using noodles to lasso meatballs.
Just as a note, the pasta has to be thick or thicker than your average spaghetti noodle; you can’t use angel hair pasta because that’s way too forgiving of a noodle to successfully do it. A fettuccine noodle has the potential to end a marriage.
Also, to get the full experience, make it a complete spaghetti dinner, which includes salad, garlic bread, parmesan cheese and red wine and/or Mountain Dew. Why Mountain Dew? Don’t know. This is a science, and I’m not a scientist.
Then, and only then, will you know if you can truly coexist at the dinner table or if your or Calvin will make it rain.
According to Hofmann is written by staff reporter Mark Hofmann of Rostraver Township. His books, “Good Mourning! A Guide to Biting the Big One…and Dying, Too” and “Stupid Brain,” are available on Amazon.com. He co-hosts the “Locally Yours” radio show on WMBS 590 AM every Friday.