every once in a while, you get a craving for frozen pork buns.
not the good fluffy ones you vaguely remember eating at restaurants, although you haven't had one of those in a long time either. only the frozen ones you pick up from the grocery store and then later wonder if you bought the wrong brand because they didn't taste how you remembered, but you also sort of know that there isn't really a right brand.
you used to eat them sometimes when you were a kid, bringing a packed lunch to middle school. pork buns were a special occasion, though probably only if you count "ran out of sandwich meat" as special.
so some days, once every few weeks, instead of making yourself the same ham and cheese sandwich as you did every other day, you had pork buns.
you take the bag of pork buns out of your freezer. it's the only thing in there.
[[take three]]
[[take four]]you take three pork buns from the bag, put them on the plate one by one, cover them with a paper towel, and put them in the microwave. 90 seconds? you'll see how they look.
back when you were a kid, they came in packets of four, but your parents always removed one and gave you three of them for lunch. you always thought it would be simpler to just take all four, and that this was perhaps emblematic of a certain excessive restraint that they applied to most, if not all areas of life. the memory hadn't crossed your mind when you took three, but it does now, as you watch them rotate in the microwave.
maybe you can't always help reapeating [[taste<-old patterns]].you take four pork buns from the bag, put them on the plate one by one, cover them with a paper towel, and put them in the microwave. 2 minutes? you'll see how they look.
back when you were a kid, they came in packets of four, but your parents always removed one and gave you three of them for lunch. you always thought it would be simpler to just take all four, and that this was perhaps emblematic of a certain excessive restraint that they applied to most, if not all areas of life. the memory hadn't crossed your mind when you took four instead, but it does now, as you watch them rotate in the microwave.
four pork buns. a somewhat pitiful monument to [[taste<-independence]].the pork buns taste awful.
they always do, every time you get this feeling and pick up a pack at the store.
you don't usually feel like you have nostalgia for much of anything. but if you have to be chained to the past somehow, you could think of worse ways to go than with dry pork buns.