What the Pho

From an unnamed university in the greater San Francisco Bay Area...

It seems like K's and my jobs are competing for most boring today. I haven't been able to post because not one interesting, newsworthy, amusing, or even irritating thing happened. I got to work on time (before Officemate!), answered emails, attended a meeting that wasn't horrible, had a delicious shrimp taco for lunch, prepared some documents, complained to Officemate about our boss, and went home. Totally regular, normal day.

So instead I will report what our workstudy student did over the weekend because it blew my mind. The darling girl turned 20 on Friday and to celebrate she probably went out and got super drunk, but she couldn't tell us about that, so she let us in on one of her hidden passions: competitive eating.

Now this girl is half-Chinese, half-Vietnamese, super pretty and very thin. Not like scary thin, but thin enough so that you would not assume that she likes to see how much of something she can eat in a short time, but apparently she does. And for her birthday she decided on ice cream.

A local ice cream parlor offers a banana split challenge: eat a 3lb (yes. THREE POUND) banana split in fifteen minutes or less and you get a t-shirt. And a rocking ice cream headache, I would imagine. As someone who doesn't like bananas, this challenge has no appeal, but our workstudy loves banana splits and was dying for that shirt. She had tried twice before and failed and felt like her 20th birthday was her day.

Officemate and I stared incredulously as she told us this story. "YOU??" I asked. "ANYONE?!?" Officemate asked. Three pounds of ice cream, bananas, chocolate sauce, whipped cream and nuts?? In 15 minutes? I wouldn't want to eat 3lbs of anything in one sitting, regardless of how long it was, and this is not because I am a delicate flower who doesn't like to eat. Oh, no. I like food. I like ice cream. But good god, people. That's just gross.

But not as gross as her next challenge. Like a good half-Vietnamese girl, she likes her Pho and has found a restaurant that boasts a Pho challenge: 2 pounds of meat (including tripe!!), 2 pounds of noodles and a gallon of broth! It's $22. If you finish it all in an hour you get it for free, as well as the GIANT bowl it comes in. It's such a doozy that they even give losers a consolation t-shirt. This is what our darling little 20 year old workstudy wishes to do next. Eat half her body weight in (delicious, I grant you) Vietnamese noodle soup.

Tomorrow I'll be manning the office alone for most of the day and will try to get into some trouble. Otherwise I'm going to have to start recapping Gilmore Girls episodes and I know no one wants that.