reading Paul Kalanithi's When Breath Becomes Air, a piece of high octane award bait about being a talented neurosurgeon and ~philosopher of mortality~ then finding out you're going to die young of cancer, and there's this passage in it that is just bugging the shit out of me
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he describes an ER patient arriving as he's eating an ice cream sandwich for lunch. he stashes the ice cream sandwich behind a computer in the trauma bay, where there is "sweltering heat". more than half an hour later, he suddenly remembers the sandwich
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he retrieves it, "resuscitates" it by putting it in the freezer for 30 minutes, after which it's fine and "tasty". he picks chocolate chips from it out of his teeth. it's like somebody who'd only ever seen ice cream sandwiches on television wanted to write an anecdote about one
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like, anybody who has ever eaten any ice cream based food knows that after thirty-plus minutes in a hot room, you don't have a slightly wilted ice cream sandwich; if you're lucky enough not to have destroyed an expensive medical computer, you have a bag of goo
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and if for some reason you refreeze that, you have a mess of spiky ice shards that will be profoundly unpleasant to eat. and this get me suspicious of other details. chocolate chips? the only ice cream sandwiches i've seen with those are the cookie type at movie theaters.
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and who picks chocolate chips out of their teeth? why wouldn't you just lick your teeth like everybody else? idk, maybe, i guess? but at some level this passage is top tier Did Not Happen for the most bizarre and trivial reasons. so what the fuck is it doing in this book?
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Replying to @chaosprime
I buy this detail. Chocolate, like other chewable sugars, gets lodged in my molars. The rest of your points stand. Especially the 30 minute melting... if I left cheap ice cream out for 30 minutes, I’m bringing a roll of paper towels and a wastebasket when I go to get it
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apparently there are ice cream sandwiches that are made of plastic and are structurally stable at room temperature though o brave new world, that has such "food" in it
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