Your Personality, Explained By What You Order at a Restaurant

1. Chicken Tenders

You wear safety like a coat. A coat that has been worn so much, the armpits have worn out. You have to wear extra deodorant to compensate for the lack of armpit fabric. Unfortunately, the brand and make of deodorant you committed to at age nine has been discontinued. The prospect of choosing either, a new coat or a new deodorant, is too daunting, so you commit to the familiarity of stinky armpits. You would probably find great joy and relief in a prison.

2. Steak tartare

You are not like other restaurant-goers. Your aversion to cooked meat is less about the meat itself, but is a broader, more post-modern statement about going against the grain. You don’t listen to music unless it’s coming out of the record player your grandfather whittled out wood from the oak tree in his backyard. You are the sort of person who, as a Pakistani, would deliberately support India in a cricket match. You would rather swallow rat poison than listen to Taylor Swift, or make an Instagram account, or eat un-organic fruit. You’re weird like that. You don’t “fit in”.

3. “I’ll have X but without the Y, and can you please change the A to B”

You know what you want, but you have great desire for disruption. For you, taking things at face value is almost treacherous, nay, blasphemous. You cut off the sleeves from all the shirts you buy. When you visit someone’s house, you ask for the one beverage that your hosts can’t procure. The world is a canvas awaiting your signature. Many signatures, actually: small, inconsequential ones that are just there because seeing empty space made you itch, and you like scratching all your itches.

4. Chocolate Lava Cake

Life, for you, is a performance, and it would be better for everyone to stop feeling the need to rehearse. You have mastered the art of striking that spoon against the smooth, brown surface of the cake at the most photogenic angle possible. You have a different fashion sense for each one of your friend groups, based on a detailed consensus (with graphic evidence) of each of their preferences. Your hair never has a strand out of place, and if it does, then it is probably casually falling perfectly on the side of your forehead that is the most conducive to casual-hair-strand-falling.

5. Shawarma, but you used to live in the Middle East

It’s simply not as good enough as it was there. You know this before you take a bite. You know this before you order it, and you believe it with a conviction that can only be moved by heavy-duty construction vehicles. You will go to great lengths to prove a point — if those lengths are meticulous, irritating, and to the great displeasure of everyone around you, then so be it. You cannot believe people live their lives without the mighty elixir of authentic shawarma. You feel the need to change the world, because only you seem to be capable of doing so.