Excessive Food Court Ettiquette

Today I accompanied my sister and mother to a local shopping centre in order to escape my university duties. It was a dull way to procrastinate, nevertheless it was a change of scenery.

A change of scenery that I did not want, though, when it came to sitting in the food court to rest a little and to refill our energy levels with bad tasting falafel and overheated burnt pizza slices, washed down with bottles of icy cold water. I looked around at the varied amounts of people and then decided to focus my gaze on the family seated in front of me and how they behaved, in particular the father.

The father looked middle aged, in his forties. He was a little too thin, and lanky even though he did not appear to be too tall, and wore a faded tan coloured leather jacket along with jeans. His hair consisted of short, thin black curls that shone more than the hair of women in Pantene advertisements. His face was so thin that one could make our his skull. When he chewed his food, he chewed it until it became dust in his mouth and then after he swallowed, he would stick his tongue through the curves and contours of all his teeth so as to ensure no crumbs were left behind. But that was not the aspect that annoyed me about him, surprisingly. Not his strange tan leather jacket nor his constant teeth cleaning.

It was, rather, the way he compulsively wiped his five o'clock shadow after each bite. He wiped his mouth and its surroundings so many times that his face almost resembled the shine of a newly polished bowling ball. It fascinated me how this man religiously wiped at nothing as though the nearest ketchup company erupted and all of its liquids splattered on his face. He would not stop. And each time he wiped, he would stare out into the distance of the feeding savages surrounding him at the same focal point each time, and his stare would not halt until he felt as though his face was cleaner than it was when he took that bite.

He repeated this process until his entire meal was finished. I am surprised the skin around his mouth is still intact. I stared down at my pizza, which was getting colder at that stage, and I did not want to eat unless I too had a serviette in my hand at the demand of my yearning-to-remain-clean face. It was funny seeing the contrast around this man, people eating with their hands and sucking their fingers clean and wiping leftover sauce and crumbs on their sleeves and eating on. 

I appreciate this man's desire to remain hygienic, and his desire to eat neatly in the presence of others but I do not appreciate the way his compulsiveness to remain tidy brushed onto me. Now I too must acquire a pile of serviettes higher than the height of my food so as to ensure that I do not let anybody in the public domain that is the food court catch me with a piece of crumb on my face. Oh, the humility.