Yesterday I attended a family brunch that allowed my siblings to say goodbye to S. prior to her upcoming departure  for Bangkok and Hanoi this coming Sunday.  We gathered at Furlongs, where most ate eggs Benedict, omelets, or bananas foster French toast.  Because of my ongoing diet, I ordered none of the above, but enjoyed instead a grilled chicken salad with Cajun blue cheese dressing.  I’m learning to resist culinary temptation in social situations–something I feared myself unable to do two months ago.  For at least the first month of my eating and exercising regimen, I refused to enter a restaurant, afraid that I would devour forbidden foods,  fall off the dietary bandwagon  I’d strapped myself to 4 weeks before.  Since then, however, my resolve has intensified.  I’m determined to succeed.  I’m able to touch the forbidden fruit and not partake. 

At any rate, in addition to eating we discussed the benefits of brunch as social gathering– that no one needs to cook and that the event is limited to a couple of hours, at most, allowing one to fulfill other social obligations later in the day.  Plus, brunch is a semi-celebratory occasion.  It makes me feel I’ve done something special, something  “Sunday-ish,” maybe even semi-spiritual, if only in an out-to-lunch kind of way.

However, S. DOES leave on Sunday, which means we WILL be apart for 2 months, 2 months until I can join her in Hanoi at the end of the semester, hopefully during the first few days of May.  I look forward to the Vietnamese adventure itself but certainly not the two months home alone, away from the woman I love.  This coming Sunday will be brunchless, a far from celebratory occasion, as it begins an entirely other deprivation, one that only the arrival of May will satiate–no Cajun blue cheese dressing for me, plenty of blue, perhaps, but no cheese whatsoever on the menu.