The Freelancers’ Cookbook

HONEY IS A FOOD

Put it on toast. Put it on a spoon. Put it on your mouth. Just don’t get it on your computer because sticky keys are not conducive to productivity and rouse visions of sex, which will distract from productivity. Sex is not a food. Sex is exercise for the graveyard shift.

JAM IS ALSO A FOOD

Straight from the jar!!!!!

COFFEE IS A FOOD

It is no longer a food if you let it become cold. It is then a poison.

HARD-BOILED EGG, UNSALTED

If you even have the patience to crack this thing, which you don’t. Call your landlord and nervously cry, “I’m locked out of my house!” When he comes by an hour later, explain that your house is an egg and you need him to help you break in. There. A naked egg. Share the spoils with your landlord: “Are you a freelance landlord?”

A $32-DOLLAR THAI ORDER, YOU SIGNED THE BILL WITH A SHARPIE

The neighborhood Thai delivery man looks at you in your old lacrosse pinny, it’s from 2004.

“Do you still play lacrosse?” he’ll ask you. Here are three options for retort:

1. “Lax? Me? Nah. I just stare at a screen all day wondering when the keys will start typing without my assistance.”

2. “Lax? Me? Nah. I was good back in ’04, but I got a yellow card in one game for yelling obscenities in the locker room. At a computer screen. With no one around. In my sleep.”

3. “Lax? Me? Nah. Sports require my leg muscles to not have atrophied. Only three more years until my bedsores heal, though.”

Snatch the delivery bag, shove every edible part of the order into your gob, and enjoy none of it. Whoops, you ate the lime whole. Lax 4 lyfe.

WAFFLES

Don’t have a waffle iron? Make pancakes. Don’t have a griddle? Make crepes. Don’t give a fuck about eating anything with nutrients when you have to meet a 2 p.m. deadline? Starve.

A HOT SHOWER

Some say the best nourishment is a hot shower.

DINNER WITH YOUR GIRLFRIENDS AT TARTINE

Three orders of grilled saucisson? $36

One thyme roasted salmon? $26

One grilled chicken paillard? $18

Tucking your body as deeply and sorrowfully beneath the covers, with only your phone and the smell of burned popcorn as your companions, the Instagram app open and glowing through your 30 thread-count IKEA sheets that were a gift from your teenage brother when he found out you were sleeping under the dismantled box of a microwave, the images of your buoyant friends in rouge eating sausages and sipping gimlets dancing past your eyeballs like sand through an hourglass? Priceless. (As in, you are not getting paid to sit on Instagram.)

ALMONDS ARE AN EXPENSIVE HABIT

Protein ain’t free.

Previously: The Madewell Museum of Human Curiosities

Photo via monojussi/flickr.

Dayna Evans is a writer. Find her on Twitter here.